Notes

THERE ARE AROUND 280 DIFFERENT SPECIES OF squirrels Squirrels are found on every continent except Antarctica and Australia. The largest is found in India, which can grow up to 3 feet long Squirrels won’t reach their full adult size until they’re approximately 14 weeks old. Until then, they’ll learn survival skills by play fighting with their siblings and following their mother on foraging trips Food is especially important during the cold winter months for squirrels. Their noses are so powerful that they can find the location of this “buried treasure” under almost a foot of snow. They’ll then dig a tunnel and follow the scent to the stash Their tail is used for both balance and as a parachute! It fluffs out as they fall, catching air, slowing their fall, and allowing them to usually grab onto another tree or a branch. This isn’t even including the flying squirrels that have the ability to glide from tree to tree Electrical lines are no match for squirrel teeth, which have been blamed for hundreds of power disruptions across the U.S. in the past 30 years—including outages that briefly shut down the NASDAQ stock market in 1987 and 1994. As the Brookings Institution points out, "Squirrels have taken down the power grid more times than the zero times that hackers have
In the 1850s, gray squirrels in urban city parks, like New York's Central Park, were a rare sight. Tree squirrels had been nearly eliminated from many U.S. cities by the mid-19th century, but cities responded by adding more parks and trees—and by adding squirrels.4 Philadelphia held one of the first documented squirrel reintroductions in 1847, followed by others in Boston, New York, and elsewhere. By the mid-1880s, Central Park was already home to about 1,500 gray squirrels