This is an account of observations made at Silwood Park between 1963 and 1969. The main purpose of the study was to find the reasons why grey squirrels stripped bark from trees, sometimes causing serious damage in British woodlands. A scientific account of this work was presented in the form of a thesis in 1969. Much of the observational data could not easily be presented in this form because behaviour patterns in free-living wild animals need, in the descriptive phase, to be presented in the full context in which they occur, and this is hard to do without resorting to a narrative approach and subjective interpretations. This manuscript contains the narrative account. Experimental work and statistical analysis of behaviour patterns, particularly social behaviour, may follow, but only when enough is already known to collect truly comparable sets of data. This field study may warn would-be research workers against assuming that individual small mammals can be regarded in the way that some people think of insects - as standardised automatons. It would seem that each individual small mammal is a unique character that has been moulded by life experience and circumstances. They should, perhaps, be looked on in the same way as large mammals - I was not studying lions, elephants or chimpanzees like some of my contemporaries, but my animals seemed to have just as much personality. This manuscript was completed in 1976 and recommended for publication by a well-known publisher. But time passed, making the diary dates acquire an increasing out-of-date appearance, and it was eventually "reluctantly" rejected. Other publishers had similar reservations - one saying they would definitely have published it if they had received it earlier.