Owls swoop. Squirrels run, then jink to get out of the path of the swoop.
Doesn’t work with cars, which don’t swoop.
I can guess:
Raptors hunt from high enough that stereoscopic depth perception is useless. The prey can adapt it’s coloring and fur texture to match the surroundings, but it can’t adapt the coloring of it’s shadow. The raptors are looking for the shadows.
This based on my experience locating power poles around potential places to land a glider. They are much easier to find if you consciously look for the shadows.
Ouch. I had one get into the attic of my apartment. Must have been chewing on the woodwork, sounded like he was sawing his way through the support beams. Told the apartment managers and they sealed it up.
Once had a squirrel run into me. At work we have a compound with a park like area - pond, trees, paths between buildings. I was riding a bike along the path, had a squirrel see me coming, decide he was on the wrong side of the path, and then start running across the path. He didn’t go in front of me, didn’t get hit by the wheel - he ran smack into my foot on the pedal and bounced off. Stupid squirrel.
Reminds me of a great headline from The Onion years ago:
“Roadkill Squirrel Remembered as Frantic, Indecisive”
Squirrels live in forested areas, bison on the plains. In nature, they would have seldom encountered each other.
When I was a kid in Wisconsin, we had a semi-domesticated squirrel named Skippy. He lived outdoors but would regularly eat peanuts and other nuts from your hand and sit on your shoulder.
Last summer, about 9:30 pm, our next-door neighbor here in NJ rang the doorbell. Wanted to borrow a really long pole, if we had one. Seems that a squirrel had become stuck in their backyard bird feeder. (Ours is squirrel-proof, though watching the next generation of squirrels test this every spring is pretty amusing.)
We lent Neighbor a pruning hook and trooped along. Somehow this squirrel had gotten a hind leg wedged into the “V” in a double-shepherd’s-hook hanging pole. On one side, a flowerpot. On the other side, a bird feeder. In the middle, a very distressed squirrel. Anyway, Neighbor spent about five minutes trying to accomplish a rescue with the pruning hook from a long way away. Not working. I got impatient and put on my rose gloves (nearly elbow length and made out of suede for thorn protection) and walked up the feeder, where I let this squirrel stand on my arm while I tried to figure out the problem. My husband came along and we removed the flower pot. We could then see that the problem was that this little guy had somehow gotten his foot caught in a loop of the cord that hung the bird feeder and THEN wedged it into this hook-pole. So we decided to carefully lift the whole thing out of the ground, and lay it down on the ground, which let the squirrel, finally, get his foot out of the wedge. Then we cut the cord that had his foot trapped. He crouched there trembling for about five seconds, suddenly realized that we weren’t going to kill him and eat him and made a dash for the nearest tree.
Our neighbor, who’s a strapping six-footer was impressed by our “bravery.” Later I pointed out that the CDC has essentially no cases of squirrel rabies on record, and recommended that he not try the same thing if any raccoons showed up.
I think you’re off by 1 letter.
Maybe he had to wet the mail?
I think it’s that they haven’t needed to evolve to cope with the speeds a car can reach. I’ve had countless of the little Trump hairpieces run in front of my car, but rarely see dead ones on streets where cars don’t often reach 30-35 mph.
That’s cool. Next time I see them do this, I’ll look for birds overhead
There don’t actually have to be birds overhead at the time for the squirrel to do that. It’s a consistent strategy, not a response to a stimuli. It’s not like the squirrel is thinking, “Look, there’s a bird overhead, I should lie down.”