Squirrels have the perfect ability to stick their landings

August 9, 2021

Nearly the entire life of a squirrel is spent in a death-defying, arboreal high-wire act where a miscalculated leap could spell disaster.

To navigate their precarious daily rounds, squirrels make fast, sophisticated mental calculations to stick landings on wobbly branches and even deploy maneuvers frequently seen in the acrobatic free-running sport of parkour, reports Jonathan Lambert for Science News.

“As a model organism to understand the biological limits of balance and agility, I would argue that squirrels are second to none,” says study author Nathaniel Hunt, a biomechanics researcher at the University of Nebraska.

Researchers set up a series of experimental jumps in a eucalyptus grove at the University of California, Berkeley campus to make close observations of how wild squirrels approached different jumps.

One of the parameters the researchers tested was how the squirrels alter their jumps based on the bendiness of their launching pad and the distance they have to clear.

If a branch was especially flimsy, the animals would initiate their jump earlier, even if the jump was relatively long. That’s because, according to Science News, the squirrels' choices of when to leap were influenced about six times more heavily by branch flexibility than they were distance.