A PLEA FOR THE SQUIRREL.
[TO TILE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—As I know from correspondence that there are many people in England who sympathise with the squirrel in its hard struggle for life, I wish you would be so good as to let me say to them that this dry season is likely to cause great suffering amongst them as they drink a good deal, generally, I am afraid, little beside dew. I know a few people who put out, in such places as are easy of access to them, flat dishes of water with stones in them showing a little above the water, which at once prevents rapid evaporation and enables the little creatures to drink without falling in. It is mainly the want of water which induces them to attack the fruits and to bite off the twigs of the pines to get the sap, and, like most drinking animals, they will run any risks to get some fluid at a time of drought. I have heard complaints of their climbing the fruit-trees to get at the fruit, and to prevent this the tree may be fitted with a sleeve of the thinnest sheet-iron, formed of a sheet a foot or eighteen inches wide, and long enough to go round the tree and lap, and fasten with two nails at the meeting corners. This may be painted the colour of the tree, and so not disturb the eye. It should be so high above the ground that a squirrel, rat, or mouse (for these attack the fruit-trees as well as squirrels, who generally get the credit of all the injury to trees or fruit that is due to unknown causes) cannot jump past it and reach the wood above, and their claws will not hold on the metal.
The blackbirds and thrushes do infinitely more harm than all the other creatures in the orchard, but I know a kind- hearted proprietor in the Isle of Wight who has to gather all
his apples before they are ripe, and squirrels in his region are unknown, and he never allows a bird to be killed. James Russell Lowell had a tube laid on from the main for supplying with fresh water such a dish as I have described, on the lawn in front of Elmwood, and about his house the squirrels and birds were only disturbed by the cats. In front of his bed- room window a pair of grey squirrels had nested, and in his last illness he took great pleasure in watching their gambols in their Elmtree home. It must have been one of the last pleasures the outdoor world gave him, and the incident was told me by his dying daughter, looking out from the same windows when I saw her last autumn, just before she died, and the descendants of the squirrels he watched were playing still in the same trees. The same water-dish served the thrashes and the orioles, which prompted some of his finest
Nature-notes.—I am, Sir, &c., W. J. STILLMAN. amdercum, West Bournemouth.
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