Fox Squirrels’ Favorite Food

The first step to squirrel gazing 🐿👀 is attracting squirrels! 

This is usually done by handing out snacks to these furry foragers. 🌰 

But, what should you be filling your feeders with? 

To find out what wild squirrels like to eat 🍕🍪🍿 I went to my local grocery store and purchased a sampler of every type of nut and seed they had! (This does get you some weird looks at the checkout stand! 💁🏻👀)

Next, I counted out 40 of each food type, mixed them all together, and placed them on a tray. It’s like a squirrel Hometown Buffet.

Let the food preference test begin!

Everyday for six days, at 5pm I would place the tray at the base of the favorite tree of my loyal crew of 12 fox squirrels 🐿in the botanical garden 🌻🌲 on the UCLA 🐻 campus .

The tray would remain in the garden for two hours. At the end of which I recorded how many pieces of each food type was left behind. 🌰

The results are in! 🔎 📊
The favorite food of the UCLA botanical garden fox squirrels (Sciurus niger) are Walnuts! Followed closely by a tie between peanuts and hazelnuts.

Close to 80% of all the walnuts placed on the food tray over the six testing days were chosen by the squirrels. Compare that to the least liked food, sunflower seeds 🌻, where only about 10% of the items were taken!

The information I gained by completing this food preference test will help inform what types of squirrel snacks I should fill my data collecting feeder with!

Here is a video montage of squirrels selecting their favorite foods! 🐿👀🎥

Notes:

1. These food preferences may be unique to the fox squirrels living in this area, as I later found California ground squirrels and Western grey squirrels living at another fieldsite to have very different food preferences.
2. The preference testing methodology described here was adapted from Aplin et al. (2015). 

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