Squirrel buries nuts in a guy’s clothes

April 16, 2014 • 2:01 pm

This video, taken in Battery Park, Manhattan, shows a biological instinct gone awry. This squirrel, given several peanuts, buries them in the clothes of the guy who proffered the nuts, hiding them in his hood and his pockets.  What was that squirrel thinking—that the guy would remain on the bench all winter?

h/t: Barry

20 thoughts on “Squirrel buries nuts in a guy’s clothes”

          1. I didn’t know what it was, but it was exactly what I suspected it meant given the context.

    2. I liked the ending: “he’s not taking care of his nuts as he’s supposed to”.

      Said to a creature that likes to chew on them…

  2. Manhattan squirrels are incredibly tame, so s/he might actually think the guy is that reliable.

  3. He’s lucky the squirrel didn’t accidentally nip him – both squirrels & chipmunks have questionable vision and when feeding chippies, they can occasionally miss the nut a bit and nip, getting startled when the human cries out.

  5. This seems consistent with the idea that squirrels don’t need to remember specifically where they bury individual nuts; they just bury them in places that look like the kind of place you’d find a buried nut.

    Since the tame squirrels in this park have been trained to think that the pockets of people on benches are plausible places to find nuts, it then follows by squirrel logic that they must be good places to bury nuts as well.

    2. It’s a charming theory! But, I wonder if they even make a connection between burying the nut and finding it later. I remember a recent post about a squirrel attempting to bury nuts in a shaggy dog, so maybe they just opportunistically look for the closest thing that appears soft enough to bury stuff in.

      1. Whether the individual squirrel makes a conscious connection between burial and retrieval is, I think, irrelevant. What matters is that there’s likely to be selective pressure for using the same rule for choosing burial sites as for choosing search sites. Squirrels that mindlessly apply the same rule on both ends will, on average, recover more nuts than squirrels that use different (or random) rules.

        No deep thought or long memory is needed; just a compulsion to follow a consistent rule in both cases. The rule itself could be learned, but the compulsion is instinctive.

        I grant that this is largely a just-so story without much data to back it up.

  7. I was feeding a shelled pecan to a female rock squirrel sitting on my knee. She accidentally bit my finger. It was not a hard bite because she immediately realized her error. I don’t think I reacted. In any case, she jumped off my knee to the floor and looked up at me with a very contrite manner. (How does a squirrel look contrite?) I showed her another pecan and all was well.

  9. I noticed the guy has a neat split saddle on his bike to protect his own “nuts”!

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