On a recent walk, I noticed this black squirrel with a stubby tail...
What happened?! It almost didn't look like a squirrel!
According to online sources, squirrels can "drop" their tails (at various vertibrae) in an emergency - if the tail gets caught in a trap, for example.
According to the same sources, tails will not grow back - but the squirrel will manage just fine without it.
But this one - in the picture above - seems, from this angle, to have a skinny tail. (I assume it's the same squirrel that I saw climb up!)
The first time I saw a squirrel with a very skinny tail, my knowledgeable neighbor Rob told me that pregnant females remove their soft tail hairs and use them to pad their nest.
I didn't think to ask him if the hairs grew back again, but I assume they do.
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