How Humans Made Squirrels a Part of the Urban Environment - Facts So Romantic
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This engraving of a gray squirrel was included in the December 1841 issue of Robert Merry’s Museum.One day in 1856, hundreds of people gathered to gawk at an “unusual visitor” up a tree near New York’s City Hall. The occupant of the tree, according to a contemporary newspaper account, was an escaped pet squirrel, which the police had to be called in to capture.A squirrel in a tree is not much cause for excitement today. But as historian Etienne Benson writes in a fascinating recent paper, from which this scene is drawn, in 1856 squirrels were a rarity in cities. Long thought of as farm pests and frontiersmans’ game, they were only just beginning to be introduced into the parks of American cities, where humans had made homes for them. They were not urbanites to begin with. We made them that (...)
