What Do Squirrels Eat?

What do squirrels eat?

Squirrels are omnivorous animals with diets that vary significantly depending on their species and environment.¹

Tree Squirrels

Common tree squirrels primarily consume nuts and fruits, utilizing their strong jaws to gnaw through hard shells. Their diet also includes:

• Seeds, fungi, and insects.
• Plant materials such as nectar, leaves, buds, flowers, and the cambium layer of bark.
• Occasionally, they eat bird eggs, nestlings, and carrion. Some species, like red squirrels, may even hunt small animals.¹

Ground Squirrels

Most ground squirrels also maintain a varied diet of plant and animal matter, including green plant parts, caterpillars, grasshoppers, and beetles. Some species consume small vertebrates like toads and frogs, as well as bird eggs and chicks. Tropical ground squirrels often focus more on arthropods, earthworms, and fruits.¹

How do squirrels store food for the winter?

To prepare for winter, squirrels engage in organized food storage, often referred to as caching. Rather than burying nuts randomly, they follow specific strategies to ensure their survival during colder months.²

Squirrels typically employ one of two primary methods:

• Larder hoarding: Some species store their food in a single, centralized location. While this makes the stash easier to remember, it carries the risk of losing the entire supply if another animal discovers the cache.²
• Scatter hoarding: Other species bury nuts in numerous individual spots across a wider area. To manage this, they utilize a technique called “spatially chunking,” where they sort nuts by type and bury them in separate, organized caches. Research indicates that squirrels can distinguish between different nut species and group them accordingly, which helps them recall specific cache locations more effectively.²

While some nuts are inevitably forgotten—a process that inadvertently helps trees grow—the caches that squirrels do remember are part of a highly systematic approach to food security.²

What physical adaptations help squirrels find and eat food?

Squirrels possess several specialized physical adaptations that enable them to locate, access, and consume a wide variety of food sources:

• Dental and Jaw Structure: Most squirrels are equipped with strong, chisel-like incisors and powerful jaws, which are essential for gnawing through the hard shells of nuts and other tough materials.¹³
• Specialized Appendages: Some species have evolved unique features to capture specific prey. For example, the shrew-faced ground squirrel uses an elongated snout and a long tongue to capture insects and earthworms. Similarly, Sulawesi ground squirrels utilize long, strong claws to dig for beetle larvae in rotting wood.¹
• Sensory Capabilities: Squirrels rely on keen senses to identify food. While they use visual cues, they also employ chemoreception to assess the quality of potential food items. For instance, the tassel-eared squirrel can detect and select pine twigs with lower concentrations of certain terpenes, demonstrating an ability to discriminate between food sources based on chemical composition.⁴
• Navigation and Agility: Their sharp, curved claws and flexible ankle joints allow them to navigate vertical surfaces and slim branches, granting them access to food in the forest canopy or on tree trunks.³

How does a squirrel’s diet change throughout the seasons?

While the provided search results detail the diverse omnivorous diets of squirrels—ranging from nuts and fruits to insects and small vertebrates—they do not explicitly describe how these dietary habits shift specifically across the four seasons.

The available information focuses on their year-round feeding strategies, such as food storage (caching) and the systematic organization of acorns and other food sources to ensure survival. While it is established that squirrels actively store food to prepare for periods of scarcity, the Britannica knowledge base does not contain specific data regarding the seasonal fluctuations of their diet.¹²