October is Squirrel Awareness Month! Did you know there are more than 200 species of squirrels that live on every continent except Antarctica? The smallest is the African pygmy squirrel, which is only 2.8-5″ long and weighs .35 ounces. The world’s largest known squirrel is the Indian giant squirrel, which can weigh up to 4 pounds!
Tree squirrels are some of the only mammals that can descend a tree headfirst. They can rotate their ankles 180 degrees, pointing their hind feet backward to grip the tree bark from the opposite direction. Adult squirrels can have a life span of 5 to 10 years in the wild, while in captivity, some can live up to 20 years.
Squirrels prepare for cold months by burying their food in caches. One squirrel can bury up to 3,000 nuts in a season! They store nuts across dozens of locations and even organize them by type and size. Squirrels have very good spatial memory, so they use landmarks to remember where they put their caches. They can be sneaky too – if a squirrel thinks it’s being watched, it’ll pretend to bury it’s nuts. Even with their incredible memory, they still forget about quite a few of their caches. Because of this, squirrels inadvertently plant thousands of trees each year and are an important animal when it comes to planting forests.
Squirrels were once a popular pet here in America. President Warren G. Harding even had one, named Pete, who would sometimes attend White House meetings and briefs. They were even sold in pet stores from the 1700s on! Eventually they became seen as pests, and starting in the 1920s, many states enacted wildlife conservation and exotic pet laws that prohibited keeping squirrels at home.
Squirrels can be a big a problem when it comes to power outages. They’ve brought down the NASDAQ stock market twice! It’s been hypothesized that the threat to the internet and infrastructure posed by squirrels may exceed that posed by cyber attacks.
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