SQUIRRELS AND HEDGEHOGS. [To TRH EDITOR OF THE "SPRCTATOR.1 •
was much obliged by your insertion on March 21st of
my letter on squirrels, as I was hopeful it would be interesting to many of your readers. In watching the movements of squirrels I have not been able to form a definite opinion as to their arrival or departure from my lawn and policy. The simple question which puzzles me is, Do squirrels hibernate ? I am not able to say whether squirrels come from the East, West, South, or North, and I reside well up amid the Forfarshire hills; nor has any of my friends noticed arrivals such as one sees in the cases of magpies, the cuckoo, the heron, the starling, the owl, and the lapwing. I know what a hedgehog does when he hibernates. He very carefully selects an old tree which has been cut down, and whose root has rotted during many years of exposure and decay. Then he gathers a large quantity of weathered leaves, which he deposits in the root. Afterwards he makes his bed carefully down to the bottom, and pulls the crisp leaves over him, just as an Irishman going to bed in an Edinburgh hotel in Princes Street would do under heavy Scotch blankets, which are full of heat and provoke pleasant dreams. If you watch carefully, you will find that the whole chateau of the hedgehog is undis- turbed from the end of November till the beginning of April, when be cautiously emerges from his lounge and struts about, becoming at once the thief and policeman of partridge and pheasant nests and eggs. The hedgehog thereafter becomes an outcast, and keepers, eldest sons, the gardener, the clergy- men, the young ladies, and the Peer of the realm cannot avoid loathing him ; and the wonder is that he leaves behind him any progeny to mourn his demise! The other day I came upon a hedgehog who had made an attempt to get into my garden in quest of potatoes and an old beehive. He had pushed half through the iron rails of the gate, and there the poor creature stuck, doomed to a cruel death by starvation, the impossibility of saving him arising from his quills pointing the adverse way, and the only seeming solution was to smash the gate or order his execution there and then. This was the seeming resource after debating the crux by a house jury in the library, of which jury my wife, the girls, and my sons, including the doctor, who had stayed for lunch, were the Court. The only objector was my daughter, Elizabeth Mary, who was hugging her Pomeranian and shedding tears, and who made an earnest appeal to the doctor. But he had, alas! no remedy to suggest; and, indeed, Booth to say, this was the first time in his professional experience that be had been called upon to feel the pulse of a hedgehog, or had failed to diagnose and prescribe for an urgent and needed remedy. The other question still remains — Do squirrels hibernate ?—and I hope some of your scientific readers may answer the question.—I enclose my card, and
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