Part of what we are studying with the red squirrels is how their survival and reproduction is affected by how much food they have access to (you can read more about this on our project page). We are experimentally testing some of our hypotheses by giving some squirrels access to supplemental food - peanut butter! Peanut butter might seem like a strange thing to be giving them but it's actually very nutritionally similar to spruce seed, which is their primary food source in the Yukon. We study a lot of squirrels and so there's a lot of peanut butter to put out! It can also be a bit messy. In the winter we need to heat up the peanut butter next to our woodstove so that it can be poured into 1kg containers. Each of our supplemented squirrels gets one of these 1kg containers of peanut butter every two months through the winter. We have then been keeping track of their survival and reproduction to see how they differ between on food supplemented and control squirrels, which aren't receiving any food.
We will keep you updated on the results of the experiment as they come in.