I have at least a half dozen squirrel nests up in my trees right now and I see the little guys running around every day cleaning up the acorns in the yard.
One thing I have not seen, other than road kill, is a dead squirrel lying about. There have to be some old squirrels around and I would think that some could die during a deep freeze if they are weaker.
So where are they? Do I have corpses up in my trees waiting for the crows and hawks to clean up? One could slip off a tree and fall 30 feet to its death. Do old squirrels run out into the woods when they know that the end is near?
Once they begin to slow down a bit, they are pretty sure to be nailed by a hawk, dog, or car.
An occasional one may die of cold in a nest or tree hole, but of course you won’t see those. If one dies out in the open, it will most likely be scavenged within a matter of hours. The carcasses of those few that die out of sight in the winter will be eaten by fly maggots or scavenger beetles pretty quickly once it thaws.
Bodies of small animals don’t usually persist intact long enough for you to be likely to see them under most conditions.
Found a nearly mummified one on the lawn, once. Bizarre. Nothing had touched it–I rather wonder if it hadn’t died (and dried up) up in a tree somewhere.
When Atlanta got hit with West Nile Virus a few years back, I found three dead squirrels on my lawn. Don’t know whether it was WNV that got them, or something else, but for a while there, the treetops in my neighborhood were devoid of squirrels. (They’re back now, in noisy abundance.)
When I trap mice in the basement (using a spring trap, not sticky), I put the carcass out on the rock wall in front of my house. It is gone within minutes. I always assumed a fox took it, but I put a video cam on a mouse one time and 20 minutes later, a crow swooped down and took it away whole.
Whatever got the squirrels, WNV nearly wiped out crows in some places. Crows are one of the major scavengers in urban areas, so that could be the reason the carcasses went untouched.
Oddly, I just saw a dead squirrel on the sidewalk a few houses away today. Not road kill, just a dead squirrel. I know the crows around here wouldn’t leave a carcass out for long, and there are plenty of other suburban predators to take up the slack where they leave off.
I did see a dead squirrel once, on a little-traveled sidewalk outside of a suburban forest/park. It didn’t look too bad, but then I had to be curious and use a stick to flip it over. In the spirit of today, I’ll just say it wasn’t pretty. At all.
Crows must eat everything. I saw one sit and watch a turtle lay eggs for 20 minutes, and then once the turtle left dig the eggs up and eat them. I was told by a coworker that the same thing happened the previous year. I was behind a fence so couldn’t help, but I also thought that by helping all I’d do was allow for a new batch of turtles to reproduce who go and lay their eggs in broad daylight for future crows to eat.
I’ve seen mummified squirrels in the woods and under decks. Like mice corpses they tend to decay fast. A really cool one I saw was tangled up in some vines hanging off a stone wall. That one mummified in a really cool way because it was inconvenient, if not impossible, for scavengers to get to.