If you have ever
seen a squirrel scurrying around your property,
you have probably thought how obsessive these
animals can be at times. They spend a large
number of their waking hours trying to find
every possible food source that they can, then
storing the items that they discover to prepare
themselves for the long winter that is ahead.
It is a truly remarkable process that these
animals go through every year. While not true
hibernators in every sense of the word, the
squirrels will enter into a den in the
wintertime and remain there, for the most part,
during the coldest months of the year waiting
for it to become warm enough. While they sit and
wait for this to occur, they feed off of all of
that food that they have stored, and emerge
ready to begin the process all over again it is
truly remarkable.
Watching all this may make you wonder how smart
squirrels are? It seems so amazing that they
would be able to go to this process and be able
to create a life for themselves that insured
that they had the right amount of food available
for them each and every year. Boy, they must
really be smart!
The question is if this is really about
intelligence? Are squirrels doing this because
they consciously are thinking that they need to
store their food to be able to survive. As they
go around looking for things have they developed
a list in their head of exactly what they are
looking for, like a person may create a shopping
list before they head to the grocery store?
The answer to these questions is obviously no.
Squirrels are not wise enough in any way to be
able to create a list of items that they intend
to search for. They are simply coming across
areas where they know that there is food and
they are taking whatever is available, which is
not perishable, back to their areas where they
are storing food to prepare themselves for the
winter.
What may be confused as intelligence actually
has to do more with the instinctual design of
these animals. Squirrels have a natural
intelligence about them that helps them to
create a scenario where they are able to survive
and thrive year after year. It is not about
reasoning, but about a special kind of
intelligence that instinctually helps them.
For example, a squirrel somehow knows that it is
imperative for their survival that they actually
create several different locations where they
store food during the summer. You would think
that if a squirrel was actually going to spend
its winter in a specific den that it would
simply store all its food up there. However, the
animal is intelligent enough to know that there
could be a circumstance where its den may be
breached by a predator, and so it pays to have
other options available so it can find food.
Has it ever had to do this before? Not
necessarily, but it somehow knows how to do so.
There is a special instinct about virtually
everything that this animal does that helps it
to know things that maybe it really shouldn’t.
Read more:
Squirrel
Control,
How
to Get Rid of Squirrels,
how
to get squirrels out of your attic,
Squirrel
Feces,
How
to Keep Squirrels Away from House,
How
to Kill Squirrels.
