Squirrels Are Running Deliberate Deception Operations in Your Garden. The Research Is Genuinely Impressive.
The squirrel burying a nut in your garden is not simply storing food. It is, according to a growing body of behavioral research, executing a multi-step deception strategy designed to protect that food from theft — and the sophistication of that strategy has surprised the researchers who have studied it closely.
Eastern grey squirrels cache tens of thousands of individual food items per season, burying them across a range of locations with sufficient spatial accuracy to recover approximately 80% of them months later. This alone — the memory feat required to locate thousands of buried items across changing seasonal landscapes — is remarkable.
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