The Mt. Sterling Advocate

Case in Which the Sense of Topography Seemed Instinctive.

A case of animal intelligence bearing on the question of the instinct of locality connected with the squirrel seems to me worth recording.

Last year, says a writer in the London Spectator, I bought from a local squirrel catcher a family of baby squirrels, with the intention of liberating them, when reared, to run in my wood. I had intended that the loosing should take place when the food in the woodland was in the state to give them sustenance, but one of them began to mope and grow sulky, which is a sign of illness, and generally ends in early death, so I decided to give him the chance of nature's healing, and put him out of my study window, outside which there is a shelf with food for the wild squirrel, a sleeping box and water.

He had been brought to me when a baby, unable to walk or eat, and had to be nursed with a bit of sponge, and was taken at a distance from here, and had never been outside my study since he entered it as a baby. When turned out he wandered about the house for two days, and the third day was missing. The day after I found in my toolhouse a squirrel which immediately hid among the boxes, and which I took for a wild one accidentally shut in. I routed him out, and, instead of taking to the trees, he ran across the garden walks to the house and went in at the scullery door, and, pursuing him, I saw that he ran through the scullery, the kitchen, the hall, which runs through the center of the house; a summer room beyond it, the windows of which were open and offered escape to the garden beyond; then up the winding stairway to the story where my study is, and there we lost him, supposing he had jumped out of an open window and had gone.

That night the servants made an outcry, finding a squirrel under their beds, and we turned out to secure him, for I now saw that it was my liberated prisoner, which, unable to get into my study, had taken refuge in the servants' room opposite to it. Driven out, he gave us another chase through the house before I opened my study door, and then he immediately rushed in and went into the sleeping box with his fellows.

Now, admitting that he might have learned the topography of the house on the outside, how could he, except by a pure instinct, have known the way through the intricate passages to his old quarters? He had to turn four right angles, pass through three rooms and two halls and up a crooked staircase, none of which had he ever been in; but he went in as straight to my room as he could have done if he had been accustomed to going about the house, and only on finding my door closed took refuge across the hall. And he was still only a half-grown creature, with instincts probably dulled by domestication. Crossing miles of open country seems to me nothing to it, for it was purely artificial ground, but he did not hesitate an instant.