BANGOR DAILY NEWS • October 25, 2021
Have you ever read something about nature that just blows your mind? That’s what happened to me when I read that squirrels hang mushrooms in trees to dry out, like clothes on a line, as a way to preserve them before winter. It didn’t take me long to unearth a bunch of scientific research on the topic. It was also fun to read the words of a naturalist who became fascinated by this same phenomenon nearly 100 years ago. In the February 1924 edition of the Journal of Mammalogy, William Everett Cram wrote about his observations of red squirrels “who gather [mushrooms] up, one by one, run up the pine stems with them and out along the slender dead branches, and then very carefully place each one in a forked twig.”