Transcript
So right now, if we’re looking for food, one of the things that we want to bear in mind is what is growing in this season. Right now all the beautiful spring greens, the fiddlehead ferns, all the spring and summer time fruits, the berries that would be blooming in the summer time, are all gone. They’ve all died out. They’ve been eaten.
What we have now is fall foods. Fall foods, when you think about traditionally, you might be thinking about turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkins. Not going to find that out here. What we’re going to find out here is squirrel food. So, all the nuts mature in the fall. And it’s called mass when the trees drop acorns, they drop hickory nuts, they drop walnuts.
Those all fall and are great food for the animals that’ll carry them through the winter because they’re high in fat. Fat is probably the largest percentage of their calories, comes from fat. So you have protein and you have fat which is also great for any mammals, great for people especially in cold weather.
One of my favorite things is to find nuts that the squirrels haven’t found and turn those nuts into bait for squirrels. So we can take a nut, and from a nut we can get a squirrel just like we find an eathworm we turn it into a fish. We find nuts, we can turn them into squirrels.
So what we have here is a really nice example of a squirrel run. If we were going to trap squirrels we could use this area because, as you can see, squirrels use it to bring their nuts, sit right here, and feed. It’s kind of a little protected area and squirrels are making it a highway. They’re running right up and down it, sitting here and feeding on hickory nuts. So this is kind of a nice place if you were going to hunt and you wanted to trap squirrel this would be a good place for it.
Interestingly, it’s also a place that the most prolific predator in this area hunts. And the most prolific predator in this area is not an animal that you would normally think of as a top shelf predator, but it’s a weasel. And there are weasel signs. There’s a weasel scent mark right here. A weasel’s hunting this. A weasel will hunt squirrel. So, just like I’ve picked it out and said this is a good place to hunt squirrel, a weasel picked it out as a good place to hunt squirrel, too.
