What is an example of scent marking?
Bert Ledner
2025-06-21 05:34:59
Count answers: 5
Squirrels leave scent marks throughout the home range for other squirrels to find.
Vaginal secretions ‘posted’ in the female’s home range during the breeding season may also give males an idea of which females are in oestrous.
Certainly, during the breeding season females appear to scent-mark much more frequently, rubbing their cheeks and anus on branches, gnawing bark and squirting urine around.
Squirrels will rub their faces on branches and trunks, depositing scent from glands around their mouth.
A female Grey squirrel stopping to deposit a scent mark from her genitals during a mating chase.
The male will subsequently sniff at this mark for several seconds, assessing how close she is to estrus.
Squirrels would gnaw areas of bark away and urinate on the stripped part of the tree such that regularly used patches, usually located under branches or in root hollows, often acquire a dark, strong-smelling stain below the gnawed area.
A Grey squirrel scent-marking a branch.
Chin rubbing is a well-documented behaviour in squirrels.
Both sexes have a number of apocrine glands in the skin around their mouths and this ‘cheek-rubbing’ or ‘face-wipe’ behaviour is thought to be a way of depositing scent from them.
It is a slow, deliberate approach while sniffing with the tail raised over the body, followed by vigorous gnawing without ingestion of bark, and repeated rubbing of the cheeks and chin against the gnawed area.
Adela Hagenes
2025-06-21 01:29:10
Count answers: 9
They also scent mark and use body postures, tail positions, facial expressions and touch to communicate.
The brownish urine stain acts as a territorial scent mark.
In doing so, the mammals keep air spaces in their warm undercoat and distribute their outer fur with castoreum oil, which they produce to scent mark and waterproof themselves.
But they also found that rats that were part of the low-freezing group stayed farther away from the scent mark, suggesting they were more avoidant than the high-freezing group.
a distinctive odor that an animal deposits on the ground or other surface, as by urinating, which functions as an identifying signal to other animals of the species.
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