Central Park · October 2018
Three Thousand Squirrels
Over eleven days in the fall of 2018, hundreds of volunteers walked every hectare of Central Park to count every squirrel they could find. They tallied 3,023 sightings, noting what each squirrel was doing, what it looked like, what it said, and how it felt about the people watching it.
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The count
The census split the park into 350 hectares and swept them one by one: eleven counting days, pausing when it rained. Scroll, and the days accumulate: 0 squirrels by the evening of October 20.
No squirrel was counted twice, in theory. The squirrels declined to confirm.
One hectare on the west side, near the Lake, logged 32 squirrels, the busiest in the park.
Two shifts a day
Counts ran twice daily: AM, just after sunrise, and PM, toward dusk. Watch the park breathe between the two.
The afternoon crowd was bigger: 0 sightings to the morning's 0. Either squirrels sleep in, or the volunteers did.
Mostly gray, sometimes not
Nearly every squirrel here is an eastern gray: 0 of them. But 392 cinnamon and 103 black squirrels are color variants of the very same species.
They are not spread evenly. Cinnamon squirrels lean south; nearly two-thirds were spotted below the park's midline. The black ones cluster north, in the deep woods. If you want to see one, head for the North Woods and look up.
What they were doing
Mostly: looking for food. 0 squirrels were foraging and 760 were eating, against 730 running, 658 climbing, and 279 chasing. One in four was up a tree when spotted, usually around 10 feet, though one sighter craned a neck at a squirrel 180 feet up.
“Pretended to bury a nut, stuck a leaf on top to make the spot less conspicuous.”Field notes, hectare 39B, Oct. 14
“Stole (found?) an entire sandwich.”Field notes, hectare 36I, Oct. 7
The park speaks
Volunteers logged three kinds of calls. A kuk (0 heard) is a sharp warning bark, often aimed at a hawk or an off-leash dog. A quaa (50) is a longer, descending alarm. The rare moan (3) signals a threat still far away.
The north end is the loud end: two-thirds of all kuks came from the upper half of the park.
Calls recreated for illustration; the census kept its microphones to itself.
Friend, foe, or furniture
For every sighting, volunteers noted the squirrel's reaction to them. 0 were indifferent. 678 ran, mostly in the wilder north. And 178 approached, clustering toward the southern end, where the tourists and their snacks are.
“Looked down on me like her imperial subject.”Field notes, hectare 22B, Oct. 13
“He is fed every day by a woman who calls him ‘Chiquita’! He ran right up to her.”Field notes, hectare 09F, Oct. 14
Still out there
The census counted 3,023 squirrels. The squirrels did not count back. They buried their acorns, teased the dogs, watched the counters come and go. And they're all still there, gray and cinnamon and black, breathing in the trees between Fifth Avenue and Central Park West.
If you go: October. Early morning. Stand near the oaks and bring nothing. They'll find you anyway.