There are over 200 species of squirrels found everywhere on Earth except the North and South Poles. There are approximately 450 species of oak trees and shrubs found in the Northern Hemisphere. Tree squirrels mainly live in holes of trees or in dreys, which are nests made of leaves and twigs, located at the top of trees. Tree squirrels are important in maintaining and regenerating second-growth oak forests through scatter-hoarding, where they store small amounts of nuts and acorns in many different locations. One squirrel can create several thousand caches of food each season. Tree squirrels are homeotherms, which means they don’t hibernate and therefore store food all autumn for consumption over the long winter. Tree squirrels fail to recover approximately 74 % of the nuts they bury; therefore they are really planting hundreds of new oak trees.
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