Squirrels. Cute, fuzzy and sometimes very annoying. Such a
pain to find your garbage has been picked apart by your friendly neighborhood
squirrel. Although irritating, they are very enjoyable to watch. They are very
common as well so you can see them almost anywhere there are trees. The way
they twitch. The noises they make. Their fluffy tails. Kinda makes up for their
devilish deeds.
(McRae posing with
his remote controlled cat)
So while you are watching the
twitchy little things, have you ever noticed any patterns? Dr. McRae at the
University of Miami did. He was curious as to what caused certain
movements and what kind of predators resulted in different reactions? During
his two year study on the adorable creatures, he listened to the noises
made as well as tail movements when the squirrels were presented with a
possible threat. McRae used several fun props to mimic predators, such as the
cat car pictured above. He theorizes that the two forms of communication are to
warn others that danger is near as well as let the predator know that it has
been spotted. The article did not specify which calls and tail movements were
correlated to a specific predator so I guess we will have to wait till that
paper comes out! Or, make observations yourself! You may think science is
boring or that everything has already been done but you would be surprised how
fun it can be and how many different things have not been studied yet.
This study is still being conducted and expanded to study
the reactions of other squirrels when a danger signal is called.
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