Hey everyone so this week I’m going to be talking to you about food. Yes food is delicious and I love a good pizza as much as the next person, but unfortunately I’m not here to get your mouth watering over, marshmellows or Haribos. Instead I’m going to be talking to you about the next ‘episode’ in my All About Autumn Series. So let’s get into it!

First off animals’ diets change considerably in the autumn. Many animals especially carnivores find their food changes quite rapidly. During the autumn, animals start to migrate leaving those who stay behind, with not much food at all.

Squirrels get around this problem by burying their nuts in the ground. This is an incredibly unique way to store food and it works really well, mostly. Some squirrels do forget where they’ve put their nuts, Princeton University conducted a biology experiment and the results showed squirrels could remember where they had stored about two thirds of 112 of their nuts. Many are quick to judge and say that squirrels are forgetful and stupid, however squirrels are actually very clever. For example if a squirrel thinks that a thief squirrel is watching him, he might dig a hole and then pretend to put his nut in it, he will then close the hole up and run off, the thief will then dig up the original squirrel’s ‘nut’ to find nothing at all, by this time the original squirrel has buried his nut safely. They have also been seen to calculate risk, a squirrel might bury some of his nuts in predator territory, because he knows that a thief squirrel is less likely to go there as they would have to spend longer looking for the original squirrels nuts.

In fact many animals store food, during the winter food is very scarce and so Autumn is a period of finding and storing what food animals can. They store things like nuts, but also leaves and seeds. Did you know that moles store worms to eat during the winter. In fact foxes store food throughout the year, only usually for a night or two, but still, talk about getting ahead of the game. Get it?

Other animals change their diets to fit with the changing seasons, badgers for example, will usually eat meat, animals like mice, rats and rabbits, however during the winter these animals are all hibernating, and so the badger must change its diet during the autumn as more and more of it’s usual diet start to disappear, the badger must adapt to eat as much food as it possibly can while there is still food around. This means that badgers are omnivores, they will eat both meat and plants, during the autumn they eat loads of berries, nuts, seeds, insects and fruit such as apples that have fallen from trees. Badgers will eat almost anything, this is because they don’t hibernate and so when food is scarce during the winter they still have to find it.

I find that putting out food not only really helps animals, but it is also amazing to have wildlife in your own garden. It just feels so great! A couple of weeks ago I mentioned bird feeders in one of my posts. I would really recommend these as they attract so many birds to your garden in a very short space of time. You can buy them in almost every garden centre and they are very cheap too! You could also put out food for animals. I know that some of my neighbours put out bread for the foxes, but I also sprinkle hedgehog food in my garden and it is all gone by the end of the night. In fact I have stayed up many times to watch our hedgehog as he eats his way through his food, if you want more information on hedgehog food please check out my hedgehog food post, it has all the information you need there!

Thank you so much for reading all about animal food in Autumn if you enjoyed this post please leave a like, and if you want to see more content don’t forget to subscribe. Please leave a comment below if you want to ask something or want me to write about something, I would really love your input. But anyway see you in the next Episode!