Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Squirrel Nuts

Episode Date: November 18, 2020

We know squirrels hide nuts. But it's actually more complex a system than you think. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, hi there. Ho there and welcome to these short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and I'm Josh

and there's Chuck and Chuck's here and I'm Josh and let's go because we're talking about squirrels. So zip, zip, zowie. Yeah, this is a continuation of our squirrel talk. We've never done one on squirrels, but I know a couple of years ago, you talked about the squirrel being your foe and then you had since turned to love and embrace squirrels.

I love the squirrels. I had a squirrel attack me, which you can see on my video doorbell. If you go to Instagram, Chuck the Podcaster at Chuck the Podcaster, you can see my squirrel attack that where the squirrel ran at my leg. And now we're gonna talk about something I thought was pretty interesting,

which is squirrels and the notion of them gathering nuts and things for the winter and hiding them. Okay, wow. Or storing them rather. Heck of an intro, Chuck. That's it for short stuff, everybody. Yeah, so I had heard about these studies before, hadn't you?

Like this isn't news to me. It was news to me. Okay, so what we're talking about, it turns out that squirrels that live in trees called tree squirrels, they're different from ground squirrels and one big thing that differentiates them aside from where they nest or den, either in the ground or in a tree,

is that tree squirrels typically don't hibernate, which is cool because then that means you can see squirrels year round, but it's rough for the squirrels because then that means that they have to sustain themselves nutritionally throughout the year, which can get kind of hard in the winter months, which is why everybody, squirrels, especially tree squirrels,

tend to stow food. They gather food during the fall to last them through the winter. That's right, and it's also why this time of year, especially in Atlanta, AKA city of 10 million squirrels, it seems like, they are everywhere this time of year. Nuts are falling on the ground,

little acorns are falling on the ground and squirrels are very, very busy. And it's sort of, you kind of take the squirrel for granted because they're everywhere, but occasionally, I will be driving around and I will just sort of laugh to myself about the fact that in my view, let's say walking or driving, I see like 10 wild animals just running around

in the middle of a city. Yeah. They're everywhere. They are, well, Georgia and Atlanta in particular is a particularly wooded metropolis. So it makes sense that they'd be everywhere in Atlanta. I think if you went to like Kansas City, you'd be sorely disappointed.

It's just a void of life. Metropolis? Okay. I'm trying out some new ways of saying things. I love it. I hope that catches fire. Thank you, thank you. So with these squirrels,

when they're storing stuff for the winter, when they're gathering all this stuff. What are they eating? Well, they're eating what's called mast, which is one of my favorite words. It's also called tree fruit, things like acorns, basically any nuts that grow on trees. They also, I didn't know this, Chuck,

apparently also will eat baby birds while they're in their nest, nestlings. Yeah, I didn't know that. That was disappointing to hear. It's a little rough, but there's one other thing you need to know about squirrels. It's pretty amazing. When they jump off of a tree and land on the ground,

if you take a snapshot photo of them landing, they land like they're superheroes. Yeah. In like a three point stance with one of their arms balled into a fist and pulled up by their side. Like they should have a cape and a mask on, basically. It's pretty amazing.

I think we might've mentioned that in another episode, but it is worth looking up on the internet for sure. Yeah. So they're gathering nuts while they're wearing their little cape or their mask. And as fall comes, they really have to step it up because they want to gather it for winter. But the thing is, is when they gather this stuff,

they don't actually gather it and store it in their nest or in their den because there's not enough room. And this actually finally, Chuck, finally, several minutes in, four plus minutes in, we get to the point of this short stuff. I think we should take a break. Oh, man. That's the best cliffhanger we've ever had.

Are you kidding me? All right. All right, let's take a break and we're gonna talk about what happens from this point forward, right after this. On the podcast. Pay Dude, the 90s, called David Lasser and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey, Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s,

called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right. Superhero Squirrels. Winter is coming. Right. Game of Thrones style. They know they got to hoard those nuts. They're also eating nuts. Yeah, they've got to, you know,

sustain themselves along the way. So they will eat stuff that they find, but they also bury their stuff. That's what they do. They don't actually have like a pantry or area of their den or nest where they're storing the nuts. They store them in an area around their tree,

usually where their nest or den is. But apparently Chuck, they'll, they'll expand out like to seven, a seven acre radius around that tree too. Yeah, they can. They're called scatter hoarders. And I think generally they like to kind of stick close to home. But if forced to, for whatever reason,

they will expand, like you said, up to seven acres away from their tree. And I think, you know, Chip and Dale did a lot of disservices. I don't know if chipmunks are the same, but all you can picture because of those, Chip and Dale and Alvin and the gang. Well, I guess Alvin and them, all they did was perform concerts.

But all you can think about with Chip and Dale is them running up and like stuffing a tree hole full of nuts for the winter. So that's kind of what you figure happens. But they don't, they know other squirrels are going to be watching out. So, and then, you know, can combine, steal their sack of nuts that is buried.

So they bury them. It's called caching about an inch underground and cover them up again. They'll even crack open nuts sometimes to keep them from germinating. That's pretty smart. And here is, there's two really great parts here to the end of this one.

The first one really gets me was in 2008, they did a study that found that eastern gray squirrels have deceptive caching. So they know other squirrels are watching. So they will literally go dig a little hole and go, all right, I'm just going to put this acorn right in here, stuff it in their mouth real quick, cover up the hole, and then run off and be like,

all right, I've just left that acorn buried over there. Nothing to see here. Isn't that amazing? It is pretty amazing. I love that too, that they, they're deceptive. They're play acting. Yeah, that's another way to put it. The other thing that they do as far as burying this stuff

is that they will put them in areas where they're at risk to go dig them up, like at risk of predation, kind of out in the open, far enough away from their tree where they're kind of, it's just getting increasingly risky to go retrieve that nut, but that they'll put high value nuts there, and we'll talk about how squirrels sort nuts in a second,

but they put high value nuts there because if it's risky for them, it's just as risky for another squirrel who's nut, who it doesn't belong to. And so that might cut down on another squirrel coming along and pilfering their buried nuts. That's right. There was another study.

This one was by Miquel Delgado and Lucia Jacobs, professors at UC Berkeley, and they said, you know what, this caching thing is a lot more complex than even we knew about. They did these experiments over 19 months from 2012 to 2014. They fed 45 marked free ranging Eastern Fox squirrels one nut at a time, 16 for each squirrel,

and all different kinds of nuts, hazelnuts, pecans, walnuts, almonds, the good stuff. And if the squirrels didn't eat the nuts, like we said, they had to take care of themselves. But if they had been fed for the day, they tracked using GPS where they buried their little nut prizes. And what did they find out?

They found out that they bury them basically according to things like size, type, potentially calorie density, taste. And so they graded them basically on value. And so like say, they gave a squirrel a bunch of walnuts. They would bury the walnuts generally in the same area away from say where they buried the almonds

or the acorns or whatever. And this is called spatial chunking. And it's a mnemonic device that we use, but it's pretty amazing that squirrels use it too to remember where they put something generally. Like walnuts are generally over here. So if I'm hungry for a walnut, I can just go over there and I'm going to dig up a walnut.

Yeah, so it's literally a device to remember things because it's a strategy. They said in their quote, it's a cognitive strategy to decrease memory load and increase accuracy of retrieval. So how you translate that is squirrels have a lot going on and they're burying a lot of nuts. So they use this little mnemonic device to remember where all the good stuff is.

Plus also don't forget they have squirrel size brains. So yeah, they want to take as many shortcuts and use as many mnemonic devices as they possibly can to remember where they bury these nuts. And it makes sense that they would be good at this because their survival depends on it, you know? So are you, which is to say, huge brains? No, very small brains.

Very small brains? That are good at taking shortcuts. Because it's true, one of the other things though is this really indicates that squirrels remember where they bury nuts and they do. They have devices for that, but they also forget a lot and they don't always crack open a nut, which means that squirrels go around and plant

lots of trees every year by going and burying acorns, you know, in the ground or walnuts in the ground. That's one of the ways that a lot of trees are propagated is through squirrels who go basically garden. So that is squirrels, everybody. They have their favorites and they hide them where they don't want them to get found, just like I would do. You know what's weird though, Chuck?

I have one question real quick. Why don't humans eat acorns? We eat everything else, all those other nuts that they use to test the squirrels out with almonds, walnuts, all that. Those two basically. Why don't we eat acorns? Any ideas? I don't know.

I think they might be toxic and they're bitter. Okay. Do you ever roast one? Roasted acorn? Yeah, like on a campfire and eat it afterwards though. Acorn squash. Yeah, I don't know if that's actually acorns. No, it's not.

Um, you got anything else about squirrels or acorns or anything like that? Nothing else. Okay, well, everybody, since Chuck said nothing else, that means that we have come to the end of the short stuff and short stuff is apt. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.