Squirrels go nuts for Halloween pumpkins
Murray Morrison noticed chewed holes in some pumpkins at the edge of his twoand-half-hectare pumpkin patch. Maybe chipmunks. Definitely not deer. Likely, it is the squirrels, sneaky as they are with their sharp little teeth.
From his experience, Morrison knows squirrels to be undiscriminating diners, eating thin-skinned varieties like Cronus and thick-skinned varieties like Kratos with equal vigour. (It’s the insects that are choosy, preferring a thinner skin.) The squirrels are opportunistic feeders, picking pumpkins in a place where they can make a quick attack before darting back to the woods. Squirrel experts describe it as a kind of cost-benefit analysis, a calculation constantly pumping in those puny squirrel brains, assessing and reassessing whether the chance to eat is worth the risk of being eaten. And Morrison, a benevolent farmer, will not seek his vengeance. It’s only a few pumpkins of thousands.
“I don’t care,” said Morrison, of Morrison Pumpkin Farm close to the shore of Georgian Bay near Collingwood, Ont.
Morrison’s massacred pumpkins will be returned to his field once Halloween is over on Wednesday, along with their pumpkin kin that were spared by squirrels but nonetheless deemed undesirable by customers for one defect or another. Together they will rot, eventually serving a new purpose to Morrison, their master, as “green manure.” But the lucky ones, selected to be jack-o-lanterns, will make their way to porches where, again, they run the risk of encountering one of the greatest threats to their short turn in the spotlight: the squirrel.
“I’ve got a squirrel staring at me right now,” said Doug Warren, a veteran letter carrier for Canada Post in Toronto.
The distressing news, for any pumpkin or lover of pumpkins, is that squirrels do not particularly enjoy pumpkins. With a fast metabolism and without the relief of hibernation, squirrels are forever on the hunt for calorie-rich, high-fat foods — mostly tree nuts. So a squirrel resorting to eating a pumpkin is essentially a sign of desperation, said Steven Sullivan, director of the Hefner Museum of Natural History at Miami University in Ohio.
Sullivan theorized that a squirrel’s choice to attack a pumpkin could be a sign that the trees in the area haven’t been masting. Masting, a phenomenon in some trees that produce seeds and nuts, is the unpredictable process of shedding a major quantity of seeds or nuts once every few years.
The Toronto Wildlife Centre said it has fielded a few complaints from residents in recent years about squirrels preying on pumpkins.