TIL that squirrel moms can carry their young

While eating brunch outside this morning, we watched a squirrel make three trips across our backyard, each time returning with a baby in its mouth. Mom and kids are now living in a tree out front.

In reply to David S. Wallens :

If you ever find a baby squirrel on the ground, particularly after a storm, make sure it's safe from predators & check on it frequently. Mom will likely come down/back & pick it up. 
 

Or if you can't watch & make sure it's safe, fasten a box partway up the tree & put the baby in it. 

I only learned recently that squirrels (adults anyway) can survive a ground landing at their terminal velocity and so can fall from effectively any height without being injured.

ProDarwin said:

I only learned recently that squirrels (adults anyway) can survive a ground landing at their terminal velocity and so can fall from effectively any height without being injured.

I just learned that, too, from here:

https://youtu.be/hFZFjoX2cGg

Entertaining and ultimately pro-squirrel (at the start, you wonder if he's going to be a dick to them), plus a good description about their ability to fall from any height, and how they can land feet down like cats. 

We have raised two batches of hurricane orphans over the last few years.  Two out of 5 still come around and come onto our back window sill to get nuts.  For being a fancy rat they are pretty cool to have around. What the females do when their kids get big enough is they just build a new nest near by and move without telling the kids the new address. 

At one point my wife had 10 squirrels that would come every day about 4pm. 

In reply to jgrewe :

This one stopped by a couple days ago. I'd never seen a squirrel lay on its belly to eat before. 

In reply to ProDarwin :

I saw a meme to the effect of a squirrel would have to free fall for 4800 miles for the fall to kill it, as it would starve to death...

They fall out of the trees in my yard all the time. The big falls do tend to stun them for a bit. I've also watched the baby carrying thing, luckily they seem to be pretty good at it. We have a lot of squirrels. And also hawks. So nervous squirrels. 

Recon1342 said:

In reply to ProDarwin :

I saw a meme to the effect of a squirrel would have to free fall for 4800 miles for the fall to kill it, as it would starve to death...

I saw that too, but I think the lack of air, temperatures, or ambinent pressure would kill it first :)

When we were having the house re-sided the crew found a nest of squirrels in the eaves. Pulled everything out, including the babies, and placed them in a box 3 feet off the ground in a blue spruce. Within minutes Momma was carrying the little ones to an existing nest in another tree 75 feet away.

They don't survive a landing from a tree with a Husky waiting at the bottm....

Instead they end up as play things and get brought into the house.

I like squirirrels though and feel bad when that happens.

ProDarwin said:

Recon1342 said:

In reply to ProDarwin :

I saw a meme to the effect of a squirrel would have to free fall for 4800 miles for the fall to kill it, as it would starve to death...

I saw that too, but I think the lack of air, temperatures, or ambinent pressure would kill it first :)

But what if the squirrel was carrying a coconut...

In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :

I have squirrels come to my yard every day.  In hot weather they will lay on the part of the concrete patio that's in the shade and yes they will look for a peanut and then go find a shady spot and lay out flat. I have even seen them do this on the steel tubes that form the top of my chain link fence as well as tree limbs.  In the winter they will lay on top of the garbage tote as the winter sun will heat up the tote.

I have a couple that I can identify as one has part of it's ear bitten off and the other has a bad right arm/leg? and only uses it to eat but walks/runs on three good ones.

They will both come up to the back door if I call them, I use a sound similar to what I've heard them make at times. They have learned to associated that with getting some seeds or peanuts.

m4ff3w said:

They don't survive a landing from a tree with a Husky waiting at the bottm....

 

Instead they end up as play things and get brought into the house.

 

I like squirirrels though and feel bad when that happens.

That's what happens at my house. Then there is a big chase when the other huskies go after the husky that got the squirrel. 

slefain said:

ProDarwin said:

Recon1342 said:

In reply to ProDarwin :

I saw a meme to the effect of a squirrel would have to free fall for 4800 miles for the fall to kill it, as it would starve to death...

I saw that too, but I think the lack of air, temperatures, or ambinent pressure would kill it first :)

But what if the squirrel was carrying a coconut...

Are we talking a red squirrel or a grey one?

They taste good too. 

My mother had a big crabapple tree next to her house. No one ever picked the fruit so the squirrels would eat lots of it.  In the fall the fruit would start to rot/ferment on the tree. More than once we saw squirrels eat this and appear to be a little drunk afterward. I saw many fall out tree after missing small jumps between branches.       

SVreX (Forum Supporter) said:

They taste good too. 

Yup.

Brains n eggs are delicious, too.

We had some doves nesting in a tree in our back yard. 

One day, when I was doing yard work, I watched the squirrels invade the nest and carry off the baby doves.  Didn't know that squirrels ate meat...

Old Wiley here likes them almost as much as Roadrunner. 

In reply to jharry3 :

There are a lot of different rodents that will eat meat if the opportunity presents itself... 

This guy lives down the road from me. 

J.B.S. Haldane, was a scientist known for his work in the study of physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and mathematics. He made innovative contributions to the fields of statistics and biostatistics.  In 1926, he wrote On Being the Right SIze.  It's well worth a read.

Here are a few of his observations:

Gravity, .... To the mouse and any smaller animal it presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal's length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.

An insect, therefore, is not afraid of gravity; it can fall without danger, and can cling to the ceiling with remarkably little trouble. It can go in for elegant and fantastic forms of support like that of the daddy-longlegs. But there is a force which is as formidable to an insect as gravitation to a mammal. This is surface tension. A man coming out of a bath carries with him a film of water about one-fiftieth of an inch in thickness. This weighs roughly a pound. A wet mouse has to carry about its own weight of water. A wet fly has to lift many times its own weight and, as everyone knows, a fly once wetted by water or any other liquid is in a very serious position indeed. An insect going for a drink is in a great danger as man leaning out over a precipice in search of food. If it once falls into the grip of the surface tension of the water -that is to say, gets wet - it is likely to remain so until it downs. A few insects, such as water-beetles, contrive to be unwettable; the majority keep well away from their drink by means of a long proboscis.

On Being the Right Size

I was hiking with a friend from Germany when a squirrel crossed our path. I asked her what they were called in German, and she said, "Eichhörnchen".

No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't pronounce it correctly. She said she didn't think that the sounds of the second and third syllables exist in English.

Then she asked me what we called them, and I said, "Squirrels". She absolutely could not pronounce that word.

Up to that point, I had never thought about what a strange little word that is.

In reply to CJ (He's Just an FS) :

That's a fascinating read! Thanks for posting that.