Nautilus

How Humans Made Squirrels a Part of the Urban Environment

This engraving of a gray squirrel was included in the December 1841 issue of Robert Merry’s Museum.

ne day in 1856, hundreds of people gathered to gawk at an “unusual visitor” up a tree near New York’s City Hall. The occupant of the tree, according to a contemporary newspaper account, was an escaped pet squirrel, which the police had

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