SQUIRRELS AND COCOANUTS.
[TO TIIE EDITOR Or THE "SPECTATOR.")
SIR,—It may interest some of your readers to hear of an un- familiar use for cocoanuts. I thought I had discovered the real mission of the cocoanut when, some years ago, I found that the dry shard of the nut made an admirable firelighter ; but I have now discovered that the proper use of all cocoanuts is to be cut into halves and hung up in gardens to attract squirrels. I have hung up half-cocoanuts in my garden for years, to fill the garden as full as I can of tits in winter. This winter the nuts have been discovered by squirrels, and consequently I cannot work in the mornings with any regularity. One day I found a fairly new half-cocoanut entirely empty, and puzzled over the sudden disappearance of the white interior. The next morning I happened to be looking out of the window, and down a row of pine-trees which borders my garden came a squirrel. He danced along the branches till be came to one of my apple- trees, on which hangs a nut on a wire ; then he jumped six feet through the air to the apple-tree. He sat above the nut and considered it; tried to paw at and could not reach it; ran down the tree to the lawn and sat up and looked at it. Twice he did this and gave up the nut as hopeless. He then leapt about the lawn until he saw another nut, darted up the tree, swung headlong by his feet, caught it in his hands and ate solidly for five minutes. I thought I had been granted a single vision of a freakish appetite. But he comes now every morning, dancing along the pine branches to his nuts, which he shares in a perfectly friendly manner with great tits and blue tits, one of the latter having already selected a nesting- box near a nut. Once he brought his wife with him, and raced her all along the top of my wooden rose-pergola, introduced her to the nuts, danced about the lawn with her, drank some water at a pan standing for the birds, and took her home after breakfast. Once he tumbled off the nut, the lithest, lightest tumble of a squirrel which had had a large breakfast that I ever saw. I am now waiting for a family of young squirrels to join their parents. The greengrocer may not be able to keep up the supply of nuts, but it is evidently expected by the new guests that he will. Perhaps my experi- ence is commoner than I think, but I cannot hear of another cocoanut-eating squirrel family.—I am, Sir, &c., E. P.
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