THE GROUND SQUIRREL
■ Type: Mammal
■ Diet: Herbivore
■ Average life span in the wild: Up to 12 years
■ Size: 53–73 cm
■ Weight: 5-8 kg
■ Size relative to a hand:
■ Diet: Herbivore
■ Average life span in the wild: Up to 12 years
■ Size: 53–73 cm
■ Weight: 5-8 kg
■ Size relative to a hand:
Ground squirrels live all over the world. The American red squirrel lives in evergreen forests in North and Central America. Arctic squirrels live on the tundra. Mohave ground squirrels live in the Mojave Desert of California. These are only a few of the kinds of ground squirrels there are in the world.
Ground squirrels and tree squirrels are different. You can tell the difference this way. Ground squirrels will run to their burrow in the ground if they are scared. Tree squirrels will climb a tree or high building.
Ground squirrels are mostly active during the day time. They spend a lot of their time underground in homes called burrows where they sleep, raise their babies, store food, and stay away from danger. When they dig their burrows, they make large hills of dirt and rock that buries grass or small plants. People don't like this because they are ruining plants and putting a pile of dirt where people might trip and hurt themselves. These animals can hurt shrubs, vines, and trees by chewing on them. The hills of dirt make it hard to mow or farm and hurts the machines that try to do it. This does not make the farmers like the squirrels, either.
When ground squirrels hibernate, they go into their dens to sleep through the cold of winter. They usually hibernate five to six months of the year. Their body temperatures drop so that they are only about one or two degrees higher than the temperature outside. The body temperature drops below the freezing point of water. Their breathing and heart beats slow down. A ground squirrel’s heart will beat only a few times in a minute during hibernation. Every week or so, the squirrels wake up for about 12-20 hours and then go into hibernation again. Some ground squirrels don't hibernate if they are in climates where the winters don't get too cold. Hibernation is the animal's way to adapt to things it can't change like weather or not having food available. When it's time to stop hibernating, the squirrel’s body temperature rises just as fast as it went down in the beginning.
Some squirrels estivate, which is like a summer hibernation. Estivation happens when animals are in a hot climate and need to get away from the heat. An example of ground squirrel estivation is the Mohave ground squirrel that lives in the Mojave Desert in California. They sleep for about seven months a year in burrows when the air temperature gets above 98 degrees Fahrenheit. They might go to sleep anytime from June to September and stay asleep until February. Older squirrels go to sleep before the younger ones because they are less active and don't need to store as much food to make it through hibernation. Mojave Desert squirrels also have times when the weather cools and they go into a little torpor. They get less active if the air temperature drops below 88 degrees Fahrenheit.
Males usually go into estivation first because they don't need to store as much food as the females do. Females need to feed their babies before their bodies store fat. After they come out of estivation, ground squirrels have a litter of babies. There might be seven or eight babies in the litter. The young squirrels stay in the burrow for about six weeks.
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