Nature Notebook – Squirrel Caches

Challenge: Hide all of your favorite snacks throughout your house. Leave them there for 30 days then, try to find those hidden snacks. Squirrels face a similar situation each winter but they must find the hundreds of nuts they have cached or face death by starvation.

How do they find them again? Previously, scientists thought squirrels located the nuts purely by smell (they can smell a nut under 6 inches of snow). Recent studies with gray squirrels, however, have demonstrated that the squirrels actually remember their hiding spots…even as long as 60 days!