When do squirrels start burying nuts

When it comes time to eat, they forage for the nuts they buried. While squirrels possess a strong sense of smell, which allows them to sniff out nuts from under a blanket of dirt, researchers have long noticed evidence of strategic intelligence in the placement of their food.

For instance, one study in reported that Eastern gray squirrels engage in "deceptive caching" — they dig a hole, pretend to throw the acorn in while holding it in their mouth , cover up the empty hole, and run off to another secret-stash place.

They do this, it was suggested, to fool other squirrels who might be watching. Now this: The study by Mikel M. Delgado and Lucia F. Jacobs, professors at UC Berkeley indicates more complex thinking behind the caching. In field experiments conducted over 19 months from to , researchers fed 45 "marked, free-ranging" Eastern fox squirrels one nut at a time — 16 total for each squirrel — varying the type of nut almonds, hazelnuts, pecans and walnuts.

If the squirrels didn't eat the nuts right away, researchers tracked through GPS where the squirrels subsequently buried the prizes. What they found showed evidence of " spatial chunking. No, wait, pizza was not involved in this study. But you get the point.

This mnemonic strategy has also been seen in rats. The findings, researchers write in the study , show that "a scatter hoarder could employ spatial chunking during cache distribution as a cognitive strategy to decrease memory load and hence increase accuracy of retrieval. Squirrels have a lot to think about, in other words, and they need all the memory tricks they can get. At least one other researcher — the guy who figured out squirrels were fake-burying nuts in the above-referenced study — agrees with the new findings.

Squirrels must, therefore, utilize good seasons to store for the future. Once buried, the nuts will serve an essential role during scarcity. It is now apparent that squirrels bury nuts in preparation for winter—however, there are different kinds of squirrels that display distinct characteristics.

You can, therefore, wonder if all squirrels bury nuts in preparation for winter. Not all squirrels will bury nuts. Each squirrel has its strategy of storing nuts. The best example of squirrels that will bury nuts is the grey squirrel. You can easily find a grey squirrel burying nuts within your compound.

Grey squirrels tend to bury their nuts due to competition. Grey squirrels face heavy competition from other squirrels and birds, making it necessary to hide the nuts underground where it is only known to them. However, when it comes to red squirrels, no burying is carried out. Red squirrels tend to pile up cones at the center of their territory. Red squirrels do not have the problem of competition faced by grey squirrels.

Red squirrels have a defined territory that keeps other squirrels away, reducing competition for their piled nuts. Grey squirrels also pile up their cones, intending to keep them dry.

Piling nuts keeps them dry to prevent germination. This is an important factor to worry about. If these little creatures can be so wise to store up food for the winter, do they usually remember where they store up the nuts?

The answer is yes, they do. In the wild, once the leaves begin to wither away, you can see a squirrel scampering around burying nuts. This behavior in squirrels signifies that winter is about to start. This kind of proactive stashing raises a lot of questions for squirrel enthusiasts—the most pressing being how do the squirrels find their nuts again?

Eastern gray squirrels, in particular, bury their nuts far and wide. Enjoying a well cached nut. For one, scientists have observed gray squirrels frequently burying and reburying their nuts. The gray squirrel community is rampant with nut theft. Luckily, squirrels have developed some clever tactics to protect their nuts. Scientists have observed squirrels creating false caches in order to trick thieves. If squirrels are suspicious of thieves, they will also start to hide their nuts in difficult to reach places like under bushes or in muddy areas.

This squirrel is shocked at the number of thefts in the area. The organizational chunking behavior, which Delgado identified for the first time in squirrels, may also function to provide memorable cues about the food they're burying.

This tactic could "decrease memory load," helping squirrels recall where they put it, Delgado wrote in the Royal Society Open Science study. Researchers have observed that when squirrels scatter-hoard in confined areas, they also seem to be able to remember the location of their caches in relation to one another , suggesting that they build a detailed mental map of where their food lies.

Other studies on squirrel behavior have added weight to the idea that memory underlies squirrels' nut-retrieving skills. In Chow's study on squirrels, published in in the journal Animal Cognition , she showed that impressive memory spans enable squirrels to successfully recall the solution to a difficult task manipulating levers to open a hatch that releases a prized hazelnut more than two years after they first learned it.

Over the decades, a plethora of studies have revealed that there's more to squirrels than meets the eye. For instance, researchers think squirrels may even be doing quality control on their bounty. The animals have been observed pawing over nuts and seeds for long periods of time before they bury their stash — something that might help them select nuts with the highest nutritional content, and those least likely to perish underground.

Squirrels will often also meticulously rearrange leaves over disturbed soil to hide their burial sites.