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Franklin's Ground Squirrel

By Al Lowe
Contributor

As far as I know, this is the only ground squirrel we have in Northern Ontario (not counting the Woodchuck). And again to the best of my knowledge, it is found only in the Rainy River District.
In size, this animal is somewhere between the Gray Squirrel and the Red Squirrel. It is a sort of reddish gray, but its head and neck are usually quite obviously gray. It has a fairly long tail which is bushy, but not nearly as much as our tree squirrels. Its ears are small and close to its head, so that it often looks as though it didn’t have any at all. Males and females are pretty much alike.
As its name suggests, this squirrel lives in the ground. And it seems to spend most of its time there, too. The main burrow is a fairly long affair, and down to at least three feet below the surface. It usually comes out only in daylight hours, and, if the weather is bad, not even then.
Franklin’s Squirrel has quite a varied diet. Like all other squirrels, he eats a lot of plant food - seeds, fruit, nuts, roots and so on. But he is also quite fond of animal material like insects and larvae. He will gobble up birds’ eggs, and young birds themselves, and that includes young chickens and ducklings on the farm. Ducks Unlimited says that, on the prairies they are quite effective in killing off a lot of young wild ducks. A family of these animals took quite a fancy to my bird-feeding methods. They scavenged most of the seeds which the birds spilled out of the feeder. And they also happily raided my garden for beans, carrots, lettuce and even potatoes.
In turn, they are eaten by the usual predators - hawks, owls, foxes, coyotes, and so on.
Like most ground squirrels in our latitudes, Franklin’s does hibernate. And it does so for quite a long time, too. It usually starts in late September and doesn’t reappear until about the middle of April. The young sort of hang around in a family group until they are pretty much grown. They are quite secretive about their living habits, and are never found in large groups, like many of their near relatives. They don’t live on the open prairie, or in deep woods. Like quite a few other animals and birds, they prefer the ‘edge’ areas, where they have some trees and open grasslands, too. Incidentally, these ground squirrels are pretty good at climbing trees.
Like a lot of other small mammals, these seem to have a cycle of some sort. This time it is about four years. So there may be a lot of them around one year, and very few the next.
Franklin’s Ground Squirrel, Spermophilus franklinii, is named after Sir John Franklin. Several other species are, too. He was a rather famous English explorer in the early days of Canada. He died in Canada in 1846.