October 11, 2009 - Mental Maps

Welcome to the Nature Notebook.

Gray squirrels are treasure hunters relying on a mental map to find their food caches. They gather fallen walnuts one by one and hide each in a different location. This scatter hoarding presents a challenge over storing winter food all in one location. The major obstacle is recovering this buried treasure when it is needed. Because gray squirrels live an arboreal existence, they are highly visual creatures and quite spatially oriented. In a squirrel’s three-dimensional world it is easy to pinpoint a location using visual cues. They remember the location of each stored nut to within inches after several weeks. Squirrels have the ability to find caches using visual cues even when snow changes the winter landscape. To home in on the tasty tidbit, they use a good sense of smell to pinpoint the exact location to dig.
 
This is PPL's naturalist, Jon Beam, with the Nature Notebook for WVIA.