One can but marvel at the wise prescience with which northern rodents
gather their winter stores and hide them away safe from the weather
in secret places in hollow trees, old logs, crevices among the rocks,
or in neat storage chambers dug for the purpose adjoining underground
burrows. The size of the stores and the tireless industry of these
little husbandmen in gathering them might well serve as examples worthy
of emulation by some of their human neighbors. The seeds gathered are
freed from chaff, the grasses and herbs are dried as “hay,” and roots
are carefully cleaned before being stored.
The storing habit appears to be nearly always for purely individual
benefit. The food is usually stored in bulk, but squirrels and
chipmunks often bury here and there single nuts, which they are able to
recover long afterward through their extraordinary powers of smell.
Stores are laid by for a single season, and a single failure of a nut
or seed crop will cause the starvation of many small animals, and the
failure of the crops for two or more seasons is so disastrous that the
rodents may nearly or quite all die of famine over great areas. The
reverse of this occurs during successive years of bountiful nut and
seed crops.
An abundant food supply appears to be a powerful stimulant to the
fecundity of mammals, and the number of young at a birth, as well as
the number of litters born during a season, are greatly increased by
it, until their haunts fairly swarm with them.