14 NOVEMBER 1931, Page 13

A HOARDING SQUIRREL.

A pair of grey squirrels have recently arrived in a garden where they had not been seen before ; and they have been very closely observed. One of them has almost a mania, so it seems, for burying nuts. He does not accumulate a store but buries them separately, here, there and everywhere. It ' seems entirely improbable that he is endowed with a sufficiently retentive memory to keep a record of his numerous caches. Will he ever dig up any ? I hear of grey squirrels in some places where they have not been seen before ; but there is little doubt that they are diminishing rapidly in number, even apart from the particular campaign against them. One of their newer haunts, oddly enough, is the neighbourhood of the place—on the borders of the shires of Northampton and Huntingdon—where the little owl was first released and is still most plentiful. Recent evidence suggests that the theory of the Oxford group of young biolo- gists is right. Squirrels, mice, voles, pigeons and many other animals, have their cycles like trade, and the rises and depressions are regular and, therefore, predictable.