A history of Squrrels in our cities

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

I started out posting this as a gag, but the scientist in me found it fascinating for real: 
http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/content/100/3/691.full


Journal of American History (2013) 100 (3): 691-710.
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jat353

The Urbanization of the Eastern Gray Squirrel in the United States


Notable quotes:
In The Winning of the West Theodore Roosevelt wrote of the eighteenth-century American backwoodsman's fight against “black and gray squirrels [that] swarmed, devastating the cornfields, and at times gathering in immense companies and migrating across mountain and river.

 In contrast, Seton, Vernon Bailey, William T. Hornaday, and other urban-squirrel advocates saw squirrels as opportunities for boys to establish trusting, sympathetic, and paternalistic relationships with animal others.34
Boys who failed to learn the lesson of charity offered by urban squirrels were seen as having fallen outside the bounds of civilized community and as manifesting harmful tendencies that might eventually lead to even more serious consequences.

A few months later a guard in Bronx Park was struck on the head with a shotgun and beaten senseless by the confederate of a squirrel poacher he had attempted to arrest.

[Jack]

Notable quotes:
In The Winning of the West Theodore Roosevelt wrote of the eighteenth-century American backwoodsman's fight against “black and gray squirrels [that] swarmed, devastating the cornfields, and at times gathering in immense companies and migrating across mountain and river.

I never thought of that before, but I suppose when farmers started growing corn, the squirrel's food supply was suddenly much larger and they probably had a population explosion. 

[Flangepart]

In that regard I find two words: Cane Toads.
Just way cuter.

[zelmo73]

The Urbanization of the Eastern Gray Squirrel in the United States

It was a disaster of epic proportions! 

[Ed, Ego and Superego]

Notable quotes:
In The Winning of the West Theodore Roosevelt wrote of the eighteenth-century American backwoodsman's fight against “black and gray squirrels [that] swarmed, devastating the cornfields, and at times gathering in immense companies and migrating across mountain and river.

I never thought of that before, but I suppose when farmers started growing corn, the squirrel's food supply was suddenly much larger and they probably had a population explosion. 
[/quote}
Good point