{"id":630635,"date":"2026-09-20T16:42:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T16:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/630635\/"},"modified":"2026-09-20T16:42:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T16:42:15","slug":"grey-squirrels-bury-thousands-of-acorns-each-year-and-forget-a-share-of-them-unintentionally-planting-oaks-and-reshaping-forests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/630635\/","title":{"rendered":"Grey squirrels bury thousands of acorns each year and forget a share of them, unintentionally planting oaks and reshaping forests\ufeff |"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Grey Plant a few thousand trees a year, forget where you put a fair share of them, and you have accidentally invented forestry; that is roughly what the eastern grey squirrel does every autumn. Through a habit called scatter hoarding, it buries acorns one at a time across its territory, and the ones left undisturbed, planted at just the right depth in open soil, end up in near-perfect conditions to grow. Researchers including Michael Steele, Peter Smallwood, and Mikel Delgado and Lucia Jacobs have spent years documenting how this absent-mindedness shapes oak forests across North America in \u2018The innate basis of food-hoarding decisions in grey squirrels: evidence for behavioural adaptations to the oaks.\u2019<\/p>\n

How grey squirrels accidentally plant oak trees<\/p>\n

Michael Steele of Wilkes University and Peter Smallwood of the University of Richmond have spent decades studying the acorn-burying habits of squirrels. Although squirrels eat acorns by the thousand, the pair found that as much as 74 per cent of buried acorns are never dug back up, enough to tip the balance towards oak regeneration. Volume is central to why this works; researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, put the yearly haul of a single fox squirrel, a close relative of the grey squirrel, at somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000 nuts, meaning even a low failure rate at recovery still results in large numbers of new trees.<\/p>\n

Why squirrels choose which acorns to bury and which to eat<\/p>\n

Squirrels are selective about which acorns they eat and which they store. White oak acorns sprout almost as soon as they hit the ground, pushing their stored energy down into a root and becoming worthless as a food source, so squirrels tend to eat these immediately. Red oak acorns, by contrast, stay dormant until spring, making them worth saving, so squirrels bury them instead. Steele’s research group, documenting further behaviour in the journal Animal Behaviour, found that when handed an acorn that had already begun to sprout, a grey squirrel would bite out the embryo, the growing tip, before burying what remained, effectively disabling the acorn’s ability to grow before storing it.\"Squirrels<\/p>\n

Squirrels collecting nuts from a single source organised burials by species in separate patches of ground (Image: Canva)<\/p>\n

The fake burials, deception in squirrel caching behaviour<\/p>\n

Because a substantial share of buried acorns, estimated by the National Wildlife Federation at up to a quarter of a hoard, get stolen by other squirrels, squirrels have developed a way to disguise real caches. Steele and colleagues observed more than 500 caching trials across Pennsylvania and New England, reporting in a 2008 paper, \u2018Cache protection strategies of a scatter-hoarding rodent: do tree squirrels engage in behavioural deception?\u2019 that squirrels performed a deceptive covering, digging a hole, patting down soil, then walking off with the nut still in their cheek, in about 13 per cent of caching events. This behaviour occurred more often when another squirrel was nearby, and it measurably reduced the rate at which raiders found real caches, described by the authors as the first experimental evidence of behavioural deception in a wild rodent.<\/p>\n

How squirrel memory and forgetting shape oak forests<\/p>\n

Mikel Delgado and Lucia Jacobs in \u2018Caching for where and what: evidence for a mnemonic strategy in a scatter-hoarder\u2019 tracked 45 free-ranging fox squirrels on the Berkeley campus, handing each one a series of almonds, pecans, hazelnuts and walnuts and mapping every burial by GPS. They found that squirrels collecting nuts from a single source organised burials by species in separate patches of ground, a memory strategy called chunking. Even so, no amount of spatial filing survives every hard winter, rival raid, or predator. Over generations, this leaky system of loss has been linked to Reid’s paradox, the puzzle of how quickly oaks spread north after the last ice sheets retreated; over generations, this leaky system of loss has been linked to Reid’s paradox, the puzzle of how quickly oaks spread north after the last ice sheets retreated. Long-distance seed caching by animals is one proposed mechanism for closing that gap, and the review in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution notes that squirrels act as both seed predators and seed dispersers, depending on the year and species involved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Plant a few thousand trees a year, forget where you put a fair share of them, and you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":630636,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[267718,267710,61,60,267714,267715,267717,267711,82,267713,267716,267712,267719,263],"class_list":["post-630635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-fox-squirrel-foraging-study","tag-grey-squirrel-acorn-burying","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-michael-steele-squirrel-research","tag-red-oak-white-oak-acorns","tag-reids-paradox-oak-spread","tag-scatter-hoarding-behavior","tag-science","tag-squirrel-caching-deception","tag-squirrel-memory-nut-caching","tag-squirrel-oak-forest-regeneration","tag-squirrel-seed-dispersal","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=630635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=630635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=630635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=630635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}