The Little Red Tenant: How a Berlin Squirrel Makes a Living Among Us

In Berlin, there’s a park where I go at least twice a week. It’s my go-to spot for walks and wildlife photography: on a good day, it’s possible to see blackbirds getting food on the ground, different species of finches and tits singing, mallards and mandarin ducks in the lakes, woodpeckers on the treetops, grey herons and great cormorants flying by, red squirrels running around (and maybe even a fox looking for food).

On a Saturday morning, in one of my many visits to this park, I found a squirrel near some bushes, and it looked like it was burying something. After that, the little one darted out, crossed the dirt path, and stopped near a bench. It was getting some seeds from there and burying them somewhere else. So I sat a few metres away, on the ground, to snap some shots, and that’s when an older gentleman approached me. He mentioned that there were four of them, and they always showed up roughly in the same place at the same time. Intrigued by this, I decided to look closer at how a wild forager runs like clockwork and makes a living in a human-dominated environment.