How squirrels actually find all their buried nuts

As someone who routinely “hides” things from myself—car keys, receipts, even my phone while I’m actively talking on it—I felt instantly validated by Sarah Silverman’s joke that squirrels forget where they bury 80% of their nuts. “And that’s how trees are planted!” Silverman concludes in her 2021 Netflix special, A Speck of Dust.

If these bold, bushy-tailed little trainwrecks are able to thrive despite that kind of chaos, I figured there might be hope for me: Turns out, it was too good to be true.

“I appreciate Sarah Silverman’s comedy, but actually, they’re remarkably good at it,” says Dr. Noah Perlut, a Professor at the University of New England’s School of Marine and Environmental Programs, who leads long-running gray squirrel research on campus. “You can’t be an average squirrel or you’ll die. It’s only the above-average squirrels that survive and make babies.”

Every fall, squirrels spend weeks racing against winter to stash hundreds of nuts and seeds across their territories. When food becomes scarce, they rely on these caches to survive the cold months. So, how do these exceptional squirrels relocate the hundreds of nuts they’ve hidden?

How squirrels find their nuts, in a nutshell

According to Perlut, squirrels don’t use a single strategy to recover their stashes. Instead, they draw upon a skill set that includes smell, sight, and even cues from other squirrels’ movements and scent marks. “They use the whole toolkit,” Perlut says.

But when it’s time to dig food back up, spatial memory seems to do much of the heavy lifting. In one field experiment, scientists tried to trick squirrels into misplacing their meals. They created fake nut stashes that looked identical to the real ones, and even swapped the grassy patches between them so the imposters carried the real scent.

The result? The squirrels didn’t waste time going down that rabbit hole. Almost without fail, they ignored the imposters and dug up their actual caches.

Even months later, squirrels can easily find where they’ve buried their nuts. Video: Squirrel digging for the nuts I saw him (her?) bury earlier in 2013, William Forsche

Decades of research, from that 1999 experiment to earlier fieldwork on gray squirrels, all point to the same conclusion: squirrels are far better at recovering stored food than Silverman’s viral joke suggests. One 1980 urban study estimated that gray squirrels retrieve roughly 85 percent of their cached nuts. 

More recently, a 2023 study reports that red squirrels living in an urban park quickly found the majority of nuts they cached, even when faced with stiff competition from other squirrels.

Squirrels are masters of organization

Another common misconception? That all squirrel stashes are buried underground.

“We commonly think of these caches as being buried in the ground, but imagine being a gray squirrel and living in a place that has a lot of snow or ice,” Perlut says. “You can’t go out and dig through two feet of ice every time you want a single acorn.”

Instead, squirrels in colder climates store food in tree hollows and branches—further evidence of how sophisticated their mental maps can be. “They have to rely on remembering where inside many trees they’ve placed food,” Perlut says.

Most tree-dwelling squirrels, including the familiar Eastern gray that’s common in the Eastern and Midwestern United States, are what biologists call scatter-hoarders, stashing hundreds of nuts across a wide area rather than keeping them all in one place. Other species, like red squirrels, prefer larder-hoarding, a fancy scientific term for stockpiling food in a single defended “pantry.” Considering the average squirrel’s home range spans six to eight acres (roughly the size of four football fields) and can include several nests, that’s a lot of terrain to keep track of. 

And they’re not only tracking their own assets; they’re keeping tabs on everyone else’s dinner plans, too. “Squirrels are not territorial, and they are watching each other’s caching behavior, stealing their food, and then caching them in other places,” Perlut says. Their memory, in other words, isn’t just about Where did I put my food? but also Where did that other squirrel put theirs?

Perlut notes that a squirrel’s memory remains excellent for about two weeks and can stay strong for up to two months. They’re also smart about retrieval timing, Perlut says: Acorns from white oak trees sprout quickly, so squirrels prioritize eating those before slower-germinating red oak acorns.

No morals, just nuts

When hunger hits, many squirrels rely on a tried-and-true strategy year-round: theft. A strategy researchers politely refer to as pilfering. 

Essentially, Perlut says squirrels visualize a color-coded mental map of their territory: one “color” for where they buried their own nuts and another for spots where other squirrels have stored their food. From a tree branch, they can scan the ground and remember not only their personal pantries, but also the best places to steal from. 

When it’s time to eat, Perlut believes they often opt for theft first. “I think they tend to try to rob, and then, if the robbing fails, they go directly to their own cache,” he says.

Although squirrels don’t intentionally share food, they rarely punish one another for the occasional acorn heist. Still, some performative misdirection is fair game: a squirrel may go through the motions of burying a nut that’s actually still hidden in its mouth—a fakeout designed to mislead anyone watching.

Believe it or not, this system of mutual thievery is usually enough to keep the peace among squirrels. It’s so efficient, in fact, that it affords them a leisurely life much of the time. 

“Gray squirrels spend an incredible amount of time not foraging. They’re resting, watching, and socializing,” Perlut says. “That just shows me how effective they must be at stashing and stealing—to be able to do that and not have to be busy all day long.”

This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

 

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