A friend recently told me that squirrels have about the worst memories in the whole world, and the reason that they bury so many nuts is that they only remember about 1 in every 20. Is this true?
Yes, they learned it from Berkeley students who do something very similar with hits of LSD 
[sub][sup]ok, joking, but the link is real[/sup][/sub]
I didn’t mean to say “yes” D’oh! It seems the squirrels, at least the gray squirrels mentioned in that article, certainly do remember.
Thanks, erislover, that’s exactly the sort of thing i was looking for.
Most male squirrels know exactly where thier nuts are!
-
-
- I have seen gray squirrels carrying off peanuts from a feeder and burying them, to dig them up a day or two later. They carry off a lot of peanuts and I only see them dig up a small number, but I don’t watch them all the time. To find the peanuts again, the squirrels nose around a lot in a wide area, every now and then digging up a peanut: they don’t just walk directly to where they buried the peanut. They tend to bury the nuts in “clusters” rather than spread around randomly, and it appears that they only remember the general area, but can smell the peanut, -or maybe the dirt, or the whiz they took there the day before, -but you see what I’m saying.
-
- I have also seen the same squirrels being followed around by Blue Jays, who dig up and eat the peanuts the squirrels bury. Often the squirrel would take a few steps after burying the nut, and the bird would walk over and dig it up and start eating, and the squirrel completely ignored the bird-- apparently they never make the connection that the bird is eating what they just buried. Smart mah foot. - MC
Oh, and I suppose you think this means that gay squirrels are smarter than straight ones, huh?
I read somewhere that one brand of squirrels (the greys?) do remember, and the other brand (red?) don’t. But collectively, the brand with the poor memories bury so many nuts that any one of them can always sniff around and find nuts and it doesn’t matter which squirrel did the original burying.
I heard, maybe on a PBS call in program, that squirrels look for nuts where squirrels would have likely hide’em.
Do relocated squirrels (hav-a-hart, car ride, release), end up starving to death because the don’t know where any nuts are? The dead ones I see are usually in the street, with smashed heads(that should be part of drivers ed: how to kill squirrels that you’ve winged in the road).
If anyone needs squirrels, I’ve got a yard full. I also got a couple of useless squirrel-loving dogs if you’re interested.