The Forestry Forum

I have some of the happiest squirrels out by my barn that I have seen in years.  They have my walkway so littered in Pine cones that I am beginning to wonder who is the messiest, them or me?
If they would just eat it all like they did the first one in the picture it wouldn't be so bad, but they cut whole cones and throw them on the ground.  I'm going to have to start wearing shoes.  
                               (https://forestryforum.com/images/YaBBImages/userpics/pine%20cones%20(squirel).jpg)

Want a chuckle? check out these videos on this squirrel site.  http://squirrels.org/video.html
                          

When I worked for BLM in Oregon, I worked with a guy who had been working in Montana.  He was working in sugar pine.

If you have ever seen sugar pine cones, they can reach up to 2' in length.  Quite balky when green.

This guy was cruising timber, when a squirrel chewed off one of the pine cones.  It probably fell about 100 feet and hit him on the head.  It drove him to his knees.  Good thing he was wearing a hard hat. :D

A friend of mine, he's the one in the motorboat on my picture site, used to work for the U.S. Park service as a surveyer.  We were admiring the size of long leaf cones here when he said, "that's nothing".  Then he started telling me stories of Sugar Pine cones.  I had never heard of such a thing and was amazed, almost didn't believe him, when he told me how big they were. He said that one thing you don't do is park your car or truck under a Sugar Pine. :D

I used to love to try and outwit squirrels. It's quite a challange.   :-/  The house I used to live in (my new house was built in what used to be a cornfield...no trees yet) had a lot of silver maple and my neighbor had a huge walnut. Every year the squirrels would busy themselves burying walnuts all over my yard for winter food. Every spring I would have a lot of young walnut trees sprouting everywhere.

One winter, there was about 2 feet of snow in the backyard (probably the front too, come to think of it  ???) and I noticed a squirrel scampering around on the snow and jam his head down into it. He jammed his head down about 4 or 5 times and then all of a sudden started digging down 'til he disappeared. He then reappeared with a walnut. Now you tell me, how in the cathair did he know that walnut was down there? Could he smell it through 2 feet of snow? ::)