There aren't many squirrels in my corner of Wales (and those that are here are sadly grey). One reason for this is that they are accustomed to sit in the middle of the road (rural, but q.busy) blithely unaware of the dangers presented by vehicles (I have had to get out of my car and usher them into a hedge on more than one occasion!). They also seem incapable of exploiting bird nuts in the way their urban cousins seem to. But - this is not a problem for our local badgers. If a nut container is low enough, the badger(s) gets up on its hind legs and clonks it until it falls off, hopefully causing it to release its contents (though it has no trouble pulling apart a metal nut holder). If the containers are too high up for this, but dangling from a free-standing bird-stand, they just push the whole thing over to get at the nuts.
On the face of the above anecdotes, ours badgers would seem to be more successful than our squirrels. Yet on the basis of numbers alone, I suspect that the squirrels do better because of their reproductive capacity. This has made me think about how you define 'success' - perhaps it is not just about numbers, or survival to reproduce, but about stability, both of the organism and the environment. Which reminds me that we humans regularly mess up the environment: our squirrels wouldn't seem so very silly if there wasn't a road meandering through their habitat.
