The sight of upturned soil and displaced plants in a garden is a common frustration for many homeowners. This behavior by squirrels is not random mischief but a deep-seated survival strategy. These busy rodents are constantly working to ensure their survival during times of scarcity, such as winter. The digging activity is driven by two main motivations: securing food for the future and seeking immediate sustenance from the ground. Understanding these instincts explains why your flower beds suddenly look like an excavation site.
The Primary Motivation: Food Caching
The most frequent reason squirrels dig is to create scattered food stores, a strategy known as scatter hoarding. Squirrels bury individual nuts, seeds, or acorns in multiple, shallow locations across their territory to reduce the risk of a single competitor finding their entire winter supply. This behavior is most common during the autumn when food is abundant and the squirrels are preparing for the lean months ahead.
The process involves creating a small, neat hole, pushing the food item in, and then using their forepaws and head to tamp down the item and cover the spot with soil, leaves, or mulch. While the joke suggests squirrels forget where they bury their nuts, they actually use impressive spatial memory, combined with scent cues, to locate their buried treasures. They are surprisingly efficient, recovering a significant percentage of their caches, often ranging from 40% to over 85%. This digging is either the initial act of burial or the later attempt to retrieve a food item.
Digging for Immediate Foraging Needs
A frequent cause for digging is the immediate search for food that is already in the ground. This foraging behavior is a direct excavation for a target, not the preparation of a storage site. Squirrels possess an excellent sense of smell that allows them to detect food sources that humans have unintentionally buried.
Flower bulbs are a common target, particularly those with a higher protein content, such as tulips and crocuses. These fleshy underground structures provide a concentrated source of nutrition that is especially appealing when other food is scarce. Squirrels may also dig to uncover underground larvae, like beetle grubs, or to investigate areas where spilled bird seed has worked its way into the soil. In these cases, the squirrel is not burying anything, but actively trying to unearth a discovered meal.
Identifying the Type of Damage
Observing the size and nature of the damage helps determine the squirrel’s motivation. Digging associated with scatter hoarding typically leaves behind small, cone-shaped holes, often only an inch or two deep and wide. These holes are usually neat, and the surrounding soil is simply displaced or lightly covered to camouflage the cache.
Damage caused by foraging for an existing food source is generally more disruptive and messy. When a squirrel excavates a specific item, such as a buried bulb or a cluster of grubs, the resulting hole is usually larger and more irregular. If the damage is concentrated around a newly planted area, like a flower bed full of bulbs, the squirrel is likely foraging for the buried plant material. Sometimes, they will even leave the partially-eaten bulb right next to the excavated hole if they found the taste unappealing.