Spatial Organization, Behaviour And Feeding Habits Of Red Squirrels: Differences Between An Urban Park And An Urban Forest

Red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris) successfully inhabit cities, utilize urban structures and adapt to alternative food sources such as supplemental anthropogenic feeding. Here, we compared two urban populations: one in a busy park and another in an urban forest. The first was expected to be highly influenced by human presence (and food delivered by park visitors), and the other was hypothesized to be unaffected by human disturbance. Our goal was to determine how they differed in terms of spatial organization, behaviour and food habits. The populations were monitored using radio-tagging. Squirrels in the park had significantly smaller home ranges than those in the forest. In both areas, they had multi-nuclear home ranges, but the number of nuclei in the park was lower than that in the forest. This probably reflects more homogenous food availability (i.e. supplemental feeding). Squirrels in the park spent more time on the ground throughout the year than squirrels in the forest. This was probably related to their dependence on human-supplemented food. Park squirrels often interacted with park visitors throughout the year - this involved approaching and taking food in 60% of the interactions. Hazelnuts and walnuts (food most often supplied by humans) dominated the diet of park squirrels, whereas pine and hornbeam seeds dominated the diet of forest squirrels. Overall, the study showed how living in the park with year-round access to supplementary food changed the spatial organization and behaviour of red squirrels compared to that of the population from the urban forest reserve.