I’m driving out of my subdivision, a squirrel runs across my path, he’s ACROSS the street and safe, he sees me, panicks, darts back and forth and finally runs BACK into my path, and…you know the rest.
My question is, why the hell do squirrels go kamikaze when they see cars? Not literally suicidial, but instead of just running across like deer (that’s another complaint; where I live about 3-5 motorists are killed a year in deer strikes), they jump all over the place when you approach them and they get hit. Too bad I don’t like roadkill.
In my animal behavior class, the prof told us that squirrels don’t have anything in their squirrel response repertoire to deal with a straight-line moving car, so they lose their friggin’ minds and do really stupid stuff. In dealing with dogs, or other animals, that are in hot ‘eat the squirrel’ pursuit, dart left, dart right, dart left, up a tree usually works. For something just moving in a straight line, dart left, dart right, splat, is a typical outcome.
If you try to intentionally run over the squirrel by chasing him through yards, across the street, into the park, then his strategy will work.
One time about 20 yrs ago, when i was riding my bike to a summer job that started at 6 a.m., I was going down an uninterrupted stretch of road with a cemetary on one side and a forest preserve on the other. (Belmont west of Cumberland, for those in Chi.) Not a car in sight, going either direction. So I’m barrelling along on my 10-speed, making time because you can believe I did not wake up any too early for a job starting at 6. Up ahead a squirrel jumps off the left curb and starts scurrying across the street. Before I realized what was happening, the little freak bolted BETWEEN THE WHEELS of my bike. What a friggin daredevil! I expected to see deer and raccoons cheering from the forest preserve. If the fancy-tailed-rat had waited 5 seconds, he could have strolled casually into the road and taken a nap on the center stripe.
I always assumed it was because they only had a 9 volt brain. My daughter thinks it’s because they have Attention Deficit Disorder.
Dinsdale, that happened to me once also! Only mine was about 18 years ago, I was coasting at a pretty good clip down a hill, and it was a chipmunk daredevil running between my wheels. Weird.
You might check the kamikaze squirrels from about a month ago. There were some decent WAGs there.
Leaving for work this morning, I nailed another one. He stands on the side, out of my line of travel, and at the last second dives under my wheels.
If his friend was on the other side waiting to do high-fours because I wrecked my minivan, he was a mite disappointed.
Squirrels have been shaped by milions of years of evolution to run from wolves, wildcats, and other large predators. When something like that is chasing you, and you’re slower yet smaller and more nimble than it, it makes good sense to dart back and forth randomly a lot, then at the last second run between your pursuer’s legs. This doesn’t work so well when dodging cars. Presumably in a few thousand years evolution will have caught up, and the squirrels will be able to avoid cars perfectly. Of course, by that time, cars will be long obsolete…