Beginning
This website is a similar to the process of a Red Squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) building a pile of pine cone debris, known as a midden. You see, the squirrel only eats the cone seeds, no the cone itself. It totally disassembles the cone into small pieces at ‘feeding stations’ (photo above). The cone remnants eventually grow into an area, now more formally called a midden, that can be 20-30 feet in diameter and up to 1.5 feet thick (Finley 1969). At this stage the squirrel re-purposes the midden as a food storage facility (tunnels added…read the detailed account again in Finley under the section: Caching Behavior and Seed Consumption) for other tasty morsels such as, fungi, fruit and most importantly, uneaten cones.
Now the cool part, Grizzly Bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) raid these middens for stored Whitebark Pine (Pinus albicaulis) cones. This is an important food for these bears; they need the seeds to build fat reserves for winter hibernation (Elkins, Tyers, Frisina and Rossi 2018). The squirrels retrieve the cones from the trees that the bears rarely climb; the cones for this pine species do not drop to the ground. Elkins et al state that 90% of the Whitebark Pine seeds eaten by grizzles come from squirrel middens.
So, the midden similes associated this website are:
- this site will grow slowly in small increments
- it will break down complex themes into smaller consumables
- posts will inspire you to dig further
- the information will ‘fatten’ your knowing
- there will be ‘aha’ moments of sweetness
- and you will come back for more 😉
