My former students and those who know me well know that I love squirrels. I had two pet squirrels (Chip and Dale) throughout my childhood after we found their fallen nest in the Hurricane Hugo cleanup at our home in rural South Carolina. They lived a long and happy life inside (my Mom and Dad were beyond understanding to say the least), and were mostly tame as squirrels go (though now I would caution anyone about trying to domesticate eastern grey squirrels even from an infant stage!). I have a robust collection of squirrel figurines, toys, handmade crafts, and paintings from students that adorn my office space (and I’m actually wearing an e=mcSquirrel shirt today that a student gifted me years ago).
Most prominent is a large squirrel plushie, given by a student in my first year of teaching way back in 2002, named Maxwell (after the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who helped us understand electromagnetics), which played a prominent role in countless physics demonstrations in every classroom I was fortunate enough to occupy over the years and many of my favorite students have signed with Sharpie over the years.
Outside on our front porch is a rather large concrete statue of a squirrel nibbling on an acorn that weighs too much for me to move, and my children like to think of it as a deity to our plethora of squirrel neighbors (who I scatter nuts and feed for every morning, especially in these colder months) that cohabit the land we live on now in the Piedmont of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
All that to say, I’m not sure why the squirrel became my spirit animal, but here we are.
Wonderful little podcast episode here…
Squirrels can find 85% of the nuts they hide | Popular Science:
Every fall, squirrels stash thousands of nuts and other snacks in preparation for winter. For our fluffy-tailed friends, survival depends on being able to locate these food stores months later. So, how do they do it? In this episode of Ask Us Anything, we talk about the skills squirrels use to find their food and debunk a common misconception about how many nuts they lose.