Squirrels are cute and have bushy tail which they can cover themselves with. They love to play hide and seek in the trees and live in a hole in a tree and will gather a lot of nuts in their nest so they have enough to eat.
They are playful and some will even come and take a nut out of your hand, but they can also have an illness called rabies and will bite you and make you very sick.
Squirrel are rodents so they are family of the rats and mice. There are 280 different species of squirrels and they all look more or less the same. Some of them have very big eyes and bushy tails and their big eyes help them to see clearly where to climb quickly in a tree and spot their predators to get away very quickly.
When a squirrel is born, it is blind for a few weeks before it can see and very dependent on the mother.
They are herbivores and eat nuts, fruits and seeds. but some species are omnivores, because they will also eat small insects.
There is a type of squirrel that is called a 'flying squirrel', but they cannot really fly like a bird but they can glide from one tree to another. They have special 'flaps' that goes from the front leg to the back leg to help them glide. There are recording where these squirrels can glide as far as 90 meters, that is why many people actually think that they can fly.
Chipmunks is also a type of squirrel, they are just smaller and have stripes. The squirrels and chipmunk will hoard food which they will store in their nest or under ground, for when winter comes and food is scares. They can carry nuts in their little hands and they will also stuff it in their cheeks to transport it to their nest.
Watch the video and answer the questions.
- Who is Ruffles and where does she live.
- Why do Ruffles not write during winter time?
- What do squirrels eat?
- Why do they gather food before winter time?
- How do they save energy during the winter?
- Where do they hide the food?
- Why do they keep on digging up the food every few days?
- What do you like about squirrels?