There’s no doubt about it, Penn State students love squirrels. The energetic little creatures are our dogs and cats of the university. Every day as I walk across Old Main I can’t help but notice that the squirrels at PSU are very, very different from the ones at my house. Now I live in the middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania on about 12 acres of land so I have seen my fair share of squirrels. The second they see you they run away. However, our furry friends here at PSU do the complete opposite, sometimes even coming closer instead of backing away. I was so intrigued by this I decided to find out, why are Penn State squirrels so friendly?

Bill Bateman, an ecologist at Curtin University in Australia, also wondered the same thing when his family visited New York. Bateman was intrigued because even though the squirrels, the gray squirrel in this case, lived in the city they still tried their best to avoid people. He said every time he went to New York, he found himself watching and observing the squirrels’ interaction with people. He noticed that squirrels would ignore people walking by, but would run from dogs, toddlers, and other things that appeared threatening. As a result, he decided to test the idea.

The hypothesis for his experiment was that squirrels use detailed cues from people to know when to run and when to keep eating. Bateman believes that squirrels know what behaviors are normal for people and what behaviors are not normal. He believed that a squirrel would only be likely to run when a person broke the pattern or when someone would look at the squirrel.

To conduct the experiment, Bateman would spend each morning looking for squirrels. Once he saw one, he had four different ways of approaching the squirrel. The first was on the sidewalk, but not looking directly at the squirrel, the second was on the sidewalk but staring at the squirrel, the third was leaving the sidewalk but not looking at the squirrel, and the fourth was leaving the sidewalk and looking directly at the squirrel. Every time Bateman approached the squirrel he kept a slow walking pace and to measure how close he got he would drop colored pen lids. When he was done, he could measure the path the caps marked. He also had a timer running to see how long it would take before the squirrel ran.

Bateman published his results in the Journal of Zoology and found that squirrels can tell if a human is looking at them or behaves in an unusual way. He said squirrels were 40 percent more likely to run if he focused his attention on them and 90 percent of the time the squirrels ran away if he left the sidewalk and stared as he moved across the grass. He concluded that the squirrels don’t get scared by humans all the time, but they always pay very close attention to people’s movements.

While Bateman’s tests were conclusive and appear to be pretty accurate to what I witness on a daily basis, there are multiple problems with his tests. The first is he only tested in on squirrels in Manhattan and only on the gray squirrel. Another problem is the issue of a confounding variable. The squirrels could have been running away because of Bateman dropping the caps and creating an unusual noise. Which also leads to the issue of the caps bouncing around when dropped which could create a problem with the measurements. Overall, Bateman’s tests were conducted poorly, despite his positive results.

Our furry friends here at Penn State do tend to run when we start to get too close or begin behaving differently. Could it be because they know our every day actions? Why not test it yourself and play squirrel tag someday or leave a comment if you’ve noticed the same thing!

Sources:

https://student.societyforscience.org/blog/eureka-lab/stalking-squirrels-science