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Why does a squirrel plant a forest—and not even know it?

Imagine that you hid 10 thousand candies in different places - in the garden, in the park, under the stones, in the grass. Now imagine that you have to find each one in six months. Without a map, without notes. Can you do it? A squirrel can. Almost.

A common red squirrel makes up to 10,000 caches in the fall! It doesn't store nuts in one place like a hamster. It scatters them — each nut separately, in its own hole. This is called "dispersed hoarding." Why is that? Because if another squirrel or a bear finds one cache, the loss will be small. And the other 9,999 are safe!

Scientists have long wondered: how does a squirrel remember all these places? And here's what they found out. A squirrel has three assistants. The first is a fantastic spatial memory. Its small brain (weighing 7 grams!) remembers landmarks: "near a crooked stump, two steps north." The second is its sense of smell. In autumn, a nut is fresh, it smells strong - and it can smell it under 30 centimeters of snow. The third is cunning. If a squirrel sees that someone is spying on it, it pretends to hide the nut, but hides it in another place!

But the most amazing thing is yet to come. The squirrel does not find all the nuts. About 25% of the caches remain forgotten. And it is from these forgotten nuts that young oaks, hazel, and cedar trees sprout in the spring! It turns out that each squirrel plants hundreds of trees every year — without even realizing it.

So the next time you see a squirrel in the park, know that it's the gardener of the forest. Half of the oak trees you play under grew because some red-tailed forget-me-not lost its nut.