How a Squirrel Gets Nuts out of a Hole

Digging Nuts

• Squirrels dig up their nuts using claws, which consist of four fingers on the front feet. They dig by swinging their claws downward into the soil in a clawing fashion, with the claws alternating. The claws push the dirt between their legs, out of the way. The clawing action is so fast that it̵7;s difficult to tell which claw is striking the dirt at the moment.

  When the squirrel obtains a nut, it can pick the nut up with both claws and hold it in front while chewing with its teeth very rapidly. It can break the nut̵7;s shell with its teeth and remove bits of nut with its tongue. To cut through the nuts, squirrels sharpen their teeth on branches.

Finding Nuts

• Squirrels live on acorns, hickory nuts, walnuts, beechnuts and other nuts. Squirrels are very savvy with their nuts. "The Seattle Times" says they can tell which nuts are the most perishable and eat those first. They have a very good sense of smell, which allows them to smell nuts buried in the ground. Before burying a nut, the squirrel rubs it with its face to mark it with a scent that the squirrel can later identify.

Hiding Nuts

• Squirrels often engage in behaviors designed to trick other animals to protect their nuts, such as burying a nut in one location and then pretending to bury an acorn in another location. Squirrels also carefully choose where they will bury their nuts, with many squirrels choosing spots under bushes or in nests up in trees. This deceptive behavior is rarely seen in animals.

Losing Nuts

• Squirrels do not bury their food very deep. Also, they do not always find the nuts they planted, so many nuts germinate and grow new trees. Since other squirrels can smell the nuts and dig them up, gray squirrels are territorial and chase off other squirrels.

Storing Nuts

• The type of hoarding that squirrels engage in is called scatter hoarding. Some of the sites where squirrels bury their nuts are temporary, usually created when the squirrel discovers a sudden surplus of nuts and must bury them quickly to avoid other animals taking them. Squirrels can often cache thousands of nuts and acorns in a single season. They have very good spatial memory, allowing them to remember the locations of caches using nearby landmarks.