Squirrels hunting and eating meat

That's interesting, so I searched for more information.

Does the plaque actually say Seattle or just Washington? What I found [1] suggests the squirrels were introduced around 1909 and came from Washington DC, bought from this guy [2].

Here's a summary, but read the article I linked. I'm leaving out lots of interesting details.

Unlike Seattle, the problem in Minneapolis wasn't that the native squirrels didn't like the trees. The park had plenty of native red squirrels.

The problem was that Theodore Wirth, the park supervisor, hated red squirrels. He thought they killed too many songbirds, and he loved songbirds. Red squirrels did occasionally eat songbird eggs but the actual main threat to songbirds in the park was humans.

Red squirrels are also very territorial and aggressively defend that territory. They are happy to live off the food the trees provide so don't really warm up to humans. Instead they yell at humans to try to drive them away.

Grays love to eat all kind of things, and so quickly come to see humans as friendly bringers of all kinds of food.

To address this perceived red squirrel problem Thomas ordered park police to execute all the red squirrels and brought in the Eastern gray squirrels.

The grays adapted so well that by the 1930s some people were complaining:

> They adapted to city life so eagerly that by 1930, the Tribune was lamenting that Loring Park's squirrels had become spoiled "cream-puff squirrels" that bore little resemblance to their ancestral "true" gray squirrel of the American wilderness.

> "Any day in Loring Park a squirrel may choose between ice cream cones, cake and a dozen kinds of sweetmeats, or enjoy all of them to his capacity," the Tribune reported. "Instinctively they still store acorns from the old oaks. But it is a lackadaisical effort."

[1] https://www2.startribune.com/gray-red-squirrels-theodore-wir...

[2] https://www.ebay.com/itm/395169313155

>What is the point of eating something that is hard to process and digest and has no nutritional value for you

Wouldn't that make it dietary fiber then? What's functionally dietary fiber varies from species to species, but like with humans we eat things exactly like that for GI health. Birds of prey for instance eat casting (fur and feathers) which is functionally like dietary fiber for them where it would be unhealthy if you just gave them a steak without having them also eat the indigestible bits as they wouldn't be able to properly form and regurgitate pellets. Certain animals might not need something that functions like dietary fiber but for at least certain animals - like humans - eating certain indigestible things is important for good health.

> In the context of H5N1, this gives some new insight of the likelihood of the virus jumping species. Birds are everywhere, squirrels in urban environments moreso.

The H5N1 hype is not new. They have just reactivated now. My opinion is that the revenue of pharma giants has decreased after Covid, so they are looking at new sources of revenue.