📜 EwA Week Highlights: Squirrel Thieves & Deceiving Caching, 6925 Species and Counting, EwA Walks & More...

[Claire O'Neill]

Here's the recap of another busy week at EwA and a few highlights of what's coming...

  So many great events and sightings again this week, including Jen's black Eastern grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), what a cutie! At this time of the year, they're frantically acorns and the like for the winter. Throughout the winter, they'll go periodically retrieve them, so this involves memorizing all those caching spots. I only wished I had that kind of memory. Of course, they'll forget when they cached a few of those too, which will serve nicely the parent oaks if their forgotten 'child' acorns end up germinating successfully. By the way, Do you know that grey squirrels engage in deceiving caching! Grey squirrels rob each other. Some estimates that squirrels may lose as much as 25 percent of their cached food to thieves from their own species. So knowing that, a grey squirrel, if it suspects there's a potential thief around, will fake digging, or depositing that acorn (or what it's doing to cache that precious food), and go hide it elsewhere. Voila! Clever :-)

Pic: Eastern grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) | iNaturalist record © Jennifer Clifford

  Thanks to all for great biodiversity records this week! - totaling 209 observations of 148 distinct species. Curious about this week's records that have been validated by the iNat community so far? > here.

Running tally:   To date, we recorded 88,334 observations of 6,940 distinct species! Check our EwA umbrella project and see the details per site/observer & more... > here. 

EwA Coming Public Events

EwA Field Events » Check our public field events on the EwA Calendar, our next walk is Nov, Saturday 27th with Bill and Joe [ See EwA events calendar to register » ] Don't miss great opportunities to follow the rhythm of the season in our local habitats and of its wildlife!. Space is limited for all our field events. Wildlife ethics is important to us and we seek to avoid putting pressure on natural habitats that large gatherings unavoidably do. We are asking our audience to register-and-commit to avoid no-shows (or cancel when you know you can't come)

■ EwA Fieldwork (& Resources)

We're switching to monthly pheno-surveys at all our sites. Both at Horn Pond and the Fells, we'll also have weekly biodiversity scouting sessions, replacing the 3 weeks where we would usually survey phenology. Check EwA's Volunteer Program Calendar 🗓️ to know when things happen. And if one session is of interest to you don't hesitate to reach out to get the rendezvous location.

EwA Sites Map | Site Protocols and Guides - Field Rosters - Field Notes > All here! | More About EwA Citizen Science Program » here

Any questions Don't be shy. Just email me or reply to this thread.

Thanks and Have a great week!

Cheers! - Claire
Earthwise Aware | Executive Director
✉ claire...@earthwiseaware.org
✆ +1 781-883-5970 | LinkedIn Profile

 

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