A Brilliant Disguise: The Seventh Day of Squirrel Awareness Month

On the seventh day of Squirrel Awareness Month my squirrel love gave to me

Seven smelly snakeskins,

Six comfy dreys,

Five giant sweet peanut patties shaped like Texas,

Four cups of nuts,

Three Baby Ruth bars,

Two ice cream cones,

And an acorn in an oak tree!

California ground squirrels have an ingenious trick to fool one of their predators, the rattlesnake. When a ground squirrel comes across a shed snakeskin, it will rub the skin over its fur, coating itself with the snake's scent. This confuses any rattlesnake that threatens the squirrel and its young.

If a rattlesnake wanders into the area of a California ground squirrel colony, the squirrels will not wait for it to attack. They will go on the offensive against the snake, confronting it, kicking dirt at it, and waving their tails. These squirrels are even able to shunt extra blood to the veins in the tail, heating it up. Since the snake detects heat more effectively than it sees, this makes the squirrels appear larger and more threatening to the rattler.

Here is a video that demonstrates how effectively these little ground squirrels deal with a threatening rattlesnake:

The Drey: The Sixth Day of Squirrel Awareness Month

On the sixth day of Squirrel Awareness Month my squirrel love gave to me

Six comfy dreys,

Five giant sweet peanut patties shaped like Texas,

Four cups of nuts,

Three Baby Ruth bars,

Two ice cream cones,

And an acorn in an oak tree!

The drey, the familiar tree squirrel nest made of sticks and leaves, may look like a precariously constructed home. But squirrels are master builders, and the typical drey is not only secure but quite comfortable as well. A gray squirrel in her drey will be dry during rainy weather and well protected from the wind and cold. Here is what it looks like inside a typical drey:

Most squirrels, especially females with young, build multiple dreys within their territories. This way, if one drey is damaged, becomes infested with insects, or is threatened by a nearby predator, there is always at least one backup. A mother squirrel can move an entire litter of young from one drey to another within a few minutes. This is why you will often see more dreys than squirrels in a given area.

The Fifth Day of Squirrel Awareness Month

On the fifth day of Squirrel Awareness Month my squirrel love gave to me

Five giant sweet peanut patties shaped like Texas,

Four cups of nuts,

Three Baby Ruth bars,

Two ice cream cones,

And an acorn in an oak tree!

Tree squirrels, especially eastern grays, have been noted for the wide variety of foods that they enthusiastically accept. There is even a whole web site devoted to investigating what they will eat and what (if anything) they will turn up their noses at. Although mostly vegetarian, gray squirrels will happily scarf down many of the foods that humans offer them or simply leave behind, from french fries to pizza to (as noted here a few days ago) ice cream. I'm sure any squirrel would be happy to dig into one of these novelty peanut treats!

New Squirrel Blog

This is Will the White Squirrel.

He likes to travel, and he and his friend Danielle have a new blog where they post lots of original squirrel photos, as well as squirrel news and pop culture trivia. They've been blogging for about a month now, and it is definitely worth a look, so go check it out!

Fox Squirrel Caching Behavior

An interesting article from the UC Berkeley News Center discusses the strategies that fox squirrels use when caching nuts.

A group of students at the University of California, under the direction of psychology graduate student Mikel Delgado, have been tracking 70 campus fox squirrels, mapping their territories, and studying the strategies that the squirrels use to find, hide, and retrieve different kinds of nuts. The students hope to determine how the squirrels determine the quality of each nut, and decide what amount of investment to put into that nut, whether to discard, eat immediately, or to cache the nut.

Like the video in my previous post, this article confirms that tree squirrels rely on much more than just their sense of smell to locate hidden nuts. According to Delgado, the squirrels use a combination of landmarks and spatial memory to narrow down the location to a specific area, while probably relying on smell only for the "final bit of searching."

The article includes a cute video of some of the UC campus fox squirrels hiding nuts:

This looks like some extremely interesting research that promises to shed some light on the intelligence of our squirrely friends!

The Fourth Day of Squirrel Awareness Month

On the fourth day of Squirrel Awareness Month my squirrel love gave to me

Four cups of nuts,

Three Baby Ruth bars,

Two ice cream cones,

and an acorn in an oak tree!

Today's squirrel video demonstrates how tree squirrels use spatial memory to locate hidden nuts. The poster of the YouTube video experimented with three different squirrels, hiding nuts under one of four cups in a squirrely shell game. The squirrels always returned to the cup in the same position where they had previously found the nuts, even when the nuts were moved to a different cup, and even after a different colored cup had been substituted for the original.

The poster of the video makes one error in the description, saying that squirrels do not smell nuts but only locate them based on memory. Squirrels have an excellent sense of smell and most certainly can smell nuts. However, this video may demonstrate that squirrels rely more heavily on spatial memory when searching for recently-cached nuts or for food that they have recently found in a specific location.

I hope that after the experiment was ended, the squirrels were rewarded with all four cups filled with nuts!

Classic Squirrel Video, and the Third Day of Squirrel Awareness Month

On the third day of Squirrel Awareness Month my squirrel love gave to me

Three Baby Ruth bars,

Two ice cream cones,

And an acorn in an oak tree!

This classic video shows a squirrel negotiating an obstacle course that was set up in Great Britain. I believe it may have originally aired as part of a BBC program several years ago. The obstacle course segment is impressive, as the narrator describes how quickly the squirrels figured out the moves needed to reach the treat at the end.

The best part of the clip, for me, is at the end, when a city squirrel climbs into a vending machine, steals a Baby Ruth candy bar, and carries it off to a corner of a parking lot to enjoy the peanutty, caramelly, chocolatty goodness. I suppose it might have enjoyed an Almond Joy bar even more had any been available, because sometimes you feel like a nut!