What Do Squirrels Eat?

The Eastern Grey Squirrel is the species most GTA homeowners know best. They can be climbing and hopping across on backyard fences, knocking down bird feeders, burying things in lawns, and occasionally finds its way into an attic. It is one of the most adaptable urban mammals in North America, and much of that adaptability comes down to what it eats: a surprisingly varied, seasonally shifting diet that makes almost any residential property a viable food source for at least part of the year.

A squirrel does not simply find food. It remembers where food is with remarkable precision recalling 85% of their cached food. Eastern Grey Squirrels can recall the locations of thousands of individual cached food items months after burying them.

What kind of eater is a squirrel?

Eastern Grey Squirrels are primarily herbivores but are more accurately described as opportunistic foragers. Their core diet is built around seeds, nuts, and plant matter, but they supplement this with fungi, insects, bird eggs, and occasionally small vertebrates when plant food is scarce or when caloric demands are high. In urban and suburban environments they have also added human food waste, bird seed, and garden produce to their repertoire.

One of the most distinctive features of squirrel foraging behaviour is caching. Caching is the practice of burying individual food items in scattered locations across their home range for later retrieval. Eastern Grey Squirrels engage in what is called “scatter hoarding” because unlike some animals that maintain a central food store, squirrels bury thousands of individual items in separate locations, typically a few centimetres below the soil surface. They rely on a combination of spatial memory and smell to recover these items, successfully retrieving most (at least 85%) but not all. The forgotten caches that are never retrieved eventually sprout into trees, making squirrels one of the most important seed-dispersal agents in North American deciduous forests.

What do urbanized squirrels eat in the city and suburbs?

The Eastern Grey Squirrel’s natural diet overlaps heavily with what a typical GTA yard has to offer. The trees, gardens, and food waste that define residential neighbourhoods in Toronto, Mississauga, Markham, and across York Region provide exceptional foraging territories.

The most common GTA homeowner encounters with squirrels are all diet-driven:

• Bird feeder raids: Sunflower seeds, peanuts, safflower, and suet are among the most calorie-dense foods a squirrel can find in a suburban yard. A standard hanging feeder is rarely squirrel-proof regardless of what it says on the packaging. Squirrels will solve the mechanical puzzle of most feeder baffles within a few sessions of trying.
• Bulb digging: Tulip, crocus, and other spring bulbs planted in fall are detected by smell and excavated almost immediately after planting. Daffodils and alliums are the notable exceptions — their toxic compounds make them largely unappealing. Planting resistant species, laying wire mesh just below the soil surface, or dusting bulbs with cayenne pepper are the most effective deterrents.
• Garden raiding: Tomatoes, corn, sunflowers, and soft fruit are primary targets from July through September. Squirrels rarely eat an entire tomato because they take one or two bites and move on leaving the tomato to rot. The behaviour is driven by thirst as much as hunger for those dry summer periods.
• Fruit tree stripping: An apple or pear tree in a GTA backyard is one of the most productive squirrel food sources available. Squirrels harvest fruit before it is fully ripe, often carrying it to a cache site. A single tree in autumn can occupy multiple squirrels for weeks.
• Fall nut caching in lawns: The small dug holes that appear across GTA lawns in September and October are squirrel cache sites. Each hole represents a buried acorn, nut, or seed. The digging is shallow but extensive, and a well-used caching lawn can have dozens of these disturbances across a single season.

What raccoons eat in the wild by Season

A squirrel’s diet is closely tied to what is available, and that changes dramatically across the year. The GTA’s four distinct seasons create four genuinely different foraging patterns.

Spring — emerging from a lean winter

• Tree buds, catkins, and early blossoms. All these items are the first fresh food available as temperatures rise
• Fungi and mushrooms emerging in moist soil
• Bark and tree sap from wounded or broken branches
• Earthworms and beetle larvae from softening soil
• Bird eggs raided from accessible nests (opportunistic but common in spring)
• Cached nuts and seeds recovered from winter storage
• Early spring bulbs including tulips and crocuses. Gardens usually see holes dug out by squirrels looking for bulbs.

Summer — abundance and selective eating

• Wild berries: strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, elderberries
• Fruit from residential trees: apples, pears, cherries, plums, peaches
• Garden vegetables: tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, corn, squash
• Sunflower seeds and other bird feeder contents
• Insects, particularly when young squirrels need extra protein
• Fungi and wild mushrooms
• Flower bulbs and corms beneath the soil surface

Fall — hyperphagia (hunger that doesn't go away after eating) and intensive caching

• Acorns. Acorns are the single most important fall food for Eastern Grey Squirrels in Ontario
• Hickory nuts, black walnuts, beechnuts, and hazelnuts
• Pine cones and conifer seeds
• Apples, pears, and other late-season orchard fruit
• Corn and field grain from agricultural areas
• Sunflower seeds and bird feeder contents cached for winter
• Fungi dried on branches or consumed fresh

Winter — living off cached stores

• Previously cached acorns, hickory nuts, and walnuts — the primary winter food
• Pine cones and conifer seeds accessed from trees
• Bark and the cambium layer beneath bark of certain trees during severe cold
• Bird feeder seed (a critical urban winter food supplement)
• Fruit left on the tree or frozen on the ground beneath it
• Carrion and bones which squirrels gnaw for minerals when food is scarce

The fall caching surge: why autumn squirrels are so active

The frantic activity visible in GTA squirrels from September through November is driven by one of the most powerful biological imperatives in their annual cycle: the need to cache enough food to survive winter. Unlike raccoons, which build fat reserves through hyperphagia and den through cold periods, squirrels do not hibernate or enter torpor. They remain fully active through Ontario winters, relying entirely on cached food stores and continuing to forage whenever temperatures allow.

A single Eastern Grey Squirrel may cache between 3,000 and 10,000 individual food items in a single autumn season. The pace of this caching activity is nearly continuous during daylight hours in October. This is the season when squirrel-related property damage and complaints spike in the GTA, because the same energy driving the caching behaviour also drives the squirrel to explore new territory, including rooflines.

The squirrel investigating your roofline in October is not just looking for shelter. It is also mapping potential food storage sites. An accessible attic represents both a warm den and a protected cache.

The link between fall feeding behaviour and attic intrusion is direct: a squirrel that has identified an accessible entry point in your roofline during its October territory exploration is highly likely to use it as a den site. This is why fall exclusion work is the most cost-effective form of squirrel management.

When squirrels move from your yard to your home (attic and/or crawlspace)

A squirrel inside your attic is a structural and safety risk as their gnawing damages wiring, insulation, and framing continuously potentially causing a fire in the affected property. If you hear rapid daytime scurrying in the attic, or see gnaw marks on your fascia board or soffit, contact Guard More Pest Control at contact@guardmorepests.com to receive a quote for squirrel inspection today.