It is no secret that squirrels are nuts for nuts. They start collecting and storing walnuts in autumn to prepare for the winter season. But recently, a man from North Dakota, USA, claimed on Facebook that a red squirrel stored 150kg (45 gallons) in his pickup truck while he was away on a four-day office trip.
This unique behavior raises a lot of questions for many squirrel enthusiasts as even scientists are not quite sure of everything that goes behind this stashing behavior.
A Pickup Truck Turns to a Walnut Storehouse
In an article shared by News18, 56-year-old Bill Fisher said he parked his Chevy Avalanche pickup truck under a walnut tree before leaving. Upon his return, he was shocked to see that it had become a storehouse for walnuts.
Bill said this is not the first time a squirrel filled his car with walnuts because squirrels have been using his car as a storehouse since 2013. However, this time the storage was in excess as he could collect six to seven buckets of walnuts from his car.
He shared his story in his Facebook account, saying that the buckets of walnuts he could retrieve from his pickup truck have an average of 26 lbs.
Why Do Squirrels Collect and Store Nuts?
Those who live in rural areas or near a park probably have witnessed squirrels burying nuts or storing them somewhere. As Sarah Wells wrote in a blog post on the Smithsonian website, squirrels begin a preparation for what seems to be a wide-scale scavenger hunt when the weather starts to chill.
Squirrels start to hide nuts to prepare for the winter season when food sources will be scarce. This unique has raised questions among squirrel enthusiasts, such as how do these bushy-tailed creatures remember where they hid their nuts as most of them are scatter hoarders.
How Do Squirrels Retrieve Their Hidden Nuts?
Eastern gray squirrels bury their nuts far and wide, which may be harder to locate. Scientists said that gray squirrels frequently bury and rebury their nuts, perhaps to help them remember the nuts' location.
In the past, scientists believed that squirrels only relied on their sense of smell to find their food. But a 1991 research paper, titled "Grey Squirrels Remember the Locations of Buried Nuts," published in the journal Animal Behavior, showed that multiple gray squirrels bury their nuts close to one another so they can remember and return to their precise locations.
Postdoctoral fellow Mikel Maria Delgado of the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California told Live Science that the exact mechanisms as to how squirrels locate their caches remain a mystery.
But previous studies suggest that their spatial memory helps them map out territory to find their cache, especially during the winter season when it is buried under snow, and their sense of smell is not always available and effective to help them find their food.
On the other hand, Wells wrote in the blog post that squirrels rely not only on their memory to find their nuts, as nut theft is rampant in their community. Squirrels tend to lose 25% of their stash, so they have to use some clever tactics.
Scientists observed that squirrels create false caches and start to hide their nuts in difficult-to-reach places, like muddy areas or under the bushes, to trick nut thieves.
RELATED ARTICLE: World's Rarest Rabbit With Stripes Saved After Local Farmer Tried to Sell It on Facebook
Check out more news and information on Animals in Science Times.
