Squirrel behavior is not so nutty

The Seattle Times: Living: "Sylvia Halkin, a professor of biology at Central Connecticut State University, is studying deceptive behavior in squirrels, following up on a student's observation that squirrels sometimes buried an acorn then moved nearby and pretended to bury another acorn, behavior that might confuse another animal attempting to find the cache.

She and some of her students conducted an experiment in which they gave squirrels peanuts and then watched them bury them. Then the students dug up the peanuts. Subsequently, they found that when they gave the squirrels peanuts, the squirrels would bury a nut, then pretend to bury other nuts nearby. Or the squirrels would dig many holes before burying a single nut in one of them. Or they might try to bury the nut under a bush where the researchers could not see it. Or the squirrel would climb a tree and put the nut in a nest.

What surprised the students was that they were expecting only one kind of deceptive behavior, but the squirrels demonstrated a whole bag of tricks to confuse creatures, human or otherwise, who might steal their stash.

Unfortunately, the best documentation of the bountiful squirrel population is the growing number of them run over by cars. Several factors are at work in the roadkill boom. This is what biologists often call the "fall shuffle," when young squirrels especially are moving around in search of food, often crossing roads to find acorns or other food, Steele said.

Compounding the situation, squirrels are particularly active just after dawn and just before dusk, which coincides this time of year with morning and evening rush hours, a convergence that is bad news for squirrels.

That zigzag behavior, of course, is a defensive response to throw off predators."