Wednesday Vignette: What the heck?

 I made a puzzling discovery last week when I came upon the following scene:

It took me only a moment to recognize the debris left on this stump as the remnants of the flowers of Leucospermum 'Goldie' but why they were consumed and by what was a mystery

The responsible party apparently shredded the flower to get to something at its core

Whatever creature did this carried the flowers some 10-15 feet away from the shrub's position in the south side border before going to work.

Here's the shrub in question

Leucospermum flowers break away from their stems very easily once the flower is spent and many of the stems of this species tend run along the ground so "collecting" the flowers isn't difficult

Leucospermum flowers produce a nut-like fruit at their core.  Many birds, especially those in the plants' native habitat, consume the nectar but other than hummingbirds, I've never seen birds pay much attention to Leucospermums.  Protea flowers in general, including those in the Leucospermum genus, are reportedly poisonous to humans, dogs and cats.  I found a reference online to rodents and squirrels eating the nuts contained within the flower of one Leucospermum species.  It wasn't this species but the most likely hypothesis is that the culprit responsible for the mess left behind on the tree stump in my garden was a squirrel, even if I've seen few of those critters since I stopped filling the bird feeders in February due to the salmonella outbreak among songbirds.  If eating the nuts contained within the spent Leucospermum flowers is the price I pay to keep the local squirrels away from the blueberries on my back patio, I'm happy to share the flowers.