12 ms·

Squirrel stores thousands of nuts inside man's parked truck

286 points by ohjeez 5y ago

lapetitejort 5y ago
> And to think this just happened over a few days the truck was parked. Suddenly the viral pictures of communication dishes packed to the brim with nuts becomes so much more believable.
- paranoidrobot 5y ago
  There's plenty of videos of opening microwave tower dishes to have an avalanche of nuts fall out to dispell any doubt that it happens.
- myself248 5y ago
  Had you not believed them before?
b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
This is nuts I tell you.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
You know how you know this is a nice neighborhood? Because the squirrel lived long enough to cause such problems (also because this made the news).
BlasDeLezo 5y ago
Yes. They do that.
tomcam 5y ago
In tangentially related news, I have a huge, 250+ year-old black walnut tree here in Seattle. It bears one walnut a year, and this time a local chipmunk got it before I could. He then carried it up next to my second story deck and tormented me with it while I watched helplessly a roof away.
- function_seven 5y ago
  Tangent from yours: I have a very old pecan tree in my yard that'll easily fill a couple of 5-gallon buckets. More pecans than I could possibly want in a year. I thought this was great when I bought the place. Instead what I get to do is fill a couple of 5-gallon buckets with green, unripened nuts that the fucking squirrels decided to remove from the tree 2 months before they're ready. Last year I found exactly 0 viable nuts. They were all stripped off the tree before their time. I just convince myself that their happiness is my happiness. And the shade is still good.
  - tomcam 5y ago
    Preach! We have lots and lots of blueberry bushes that are apparently here on earth only to feed deer. We've never managed to get a single blueberry. We do get a lot of beautiful deer (and coyotes, and bobcats, and raccoons, and bears).
    - don-code 5y ago
      That seems accurate. I have a mulberry tree (quite tall!), and if I don't pick mulberries every morning during its 4-week fruiting time, I just end up with purple poo all over my yard instead.
  - danielodievich 5y ago
    Many years ago during one of the big corporate training events in room of about 80 people we had a little icebreaker activity, where we had to say something interesting about ourselves that nobody else knew. I don't remember what I or anyone else said, except for one lady. She was a high powered account executive or something, but as aside, she said she owned a peach and nut orchard somewhere in California, and she had a big permanently loaded shotgun in her car to "kill the f*cking squirrels" (her exact quote) as she drove through the property because otherwise "they'd get nothing at all". Great vivid picture and great icebreaker!
    - beezle 5y ago
Arrath 5y ago
Similarly, a pack rat once stripped all of the wire insulation foreword of the firewall and used it to built a nest in the engine bay of my dad's truck. Rather rude surprise to find when opening the hood to figure out why it wouldn't turn over.
lightlyused 5y ago
I had squirrels put black walnuts inside my engine, including the space in the hood so that they rolled out when I opened it to see the engine covered in nut pieces. I think they were responsible for the wiring issues I had with that car. Also found several boxes filled with black walnuts in my garage. I hate red squirrels.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Yes, it's common for squirrels to eat the wiring harness. More expensive these days since cars are so full of tightly packed wires in hard-to-get-to places.
  - asdff 5y ago
    It's a big problem now that manufacturers use soy insulation for wires, which I guess is tasty if you are a rodent.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      IIRC, there was a class action lawsuit against an auto manufacturer that thought it was a good idea to use soy to insulate wires: https://www.autobodynews.com/index.php/industry-news/item/20979-toyota-soy-wiring-class-action-lawsuit-resurrected.html https://www.autobodynews.com/index.php/industry-news/item/20...
    - jonah 5y ago
      There exists Genuine Honda Rodent Tape which is part number: 4019-2317 (Random dealer site which lists it for sale: https://www.collegehillshonda.com/product/4019-2317.html https://www.collegehillshonda.com/product/4019-2317.html)
- joecool1029 5y ago
  > I hate red squirrels. Since most of HN doesn't know, there's a big difference between grey/fox squirrels that most people see running around outside and these red devils. I would argue most haven't even seen these, they are smaller, more skittish, and typically only live around areas that have a lot of pine trees. For one, red squirrels aren't quiet, they bark and chitter all the time for warning calls or territorial challenging. They aren't social so much as combative. Extremely territorial and destructive to housing. These are the ones that will eat through wood siding then destroy attic insulation on their quest to overwinter indoors and store tree nuts inside the walls. When it's not pecan nuts rolling by in walls, they are beating the shit out one another or barking and chittering as you or your pets are nearby. Sound, smells, ultrasonic, predator calls, all ineffective to get them to leave a space once they settle in. If they have young, you can't remove (either by relocation, plugging up the hole they made, or killing) until the young is out or they'll die and stink up the house. Even if you do plug a hole, they'll spend days trying to get back in barking and scratching the whole time. I can't think of a wild animal I hate more. Exterminators don't have a high success rate against them, traps are rarely effective (and they learn fast if they escape), and the amount of damage they cause is obscene.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
If you can figure out how, you can use it against them. Create an inviting place for a squirrel to store nuts. Let the squirrel harvest the nuts for you. Then collect them from the squirrel's stash. It's easier than gathering them off of the ground yourself every day.
- chanux 5y ago
  Maybe just take.. like 25% of it. Fair share xD
Stampo00 5y ago
I don't know how this got to #2 on HN of all places. But it makes me happy that it did.
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  A friendly reminder about the massive, yet commonplace, scale of nature that often goes unnoticed, until it inexplicably ruins someone's day.
- chanux 5y ago
  I loved all the squirrel stories and added mine too.
entangledqubit 5y ago
Maybe they need to wrap their truck in a tarp. :-) https://www.nps.gov/seki/planyourvisit/marmots.htm https://www.nps.gov/seki/planyourvisit/marmots.htm
- latchkey 5y ago
  "Wrapping vehicle in chicken wire is no longer advised."
  - lapetitejort 5y ago
    Animals are too smart. Designs for bear boxes used to carry food for backcountry camping have to be regularly tested as given enough exposure, bears will figure out how to open them and eat all the tasty granola bars inside.
pvaldes 5y ago
Squirrel can't stop and will not stop. Needs the vault to survive in winter. The man could consider to put a big squirrel box near on a tree from the garden and put all the nuts inside. That would made a nice Christmas history. Is amazing how many nuts the squirrel has harvested.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  Not just winter. Oaks produce huge numbers of acorns about one season every 7 years. My yard had thousands and thousands a few years ago, for example, but very few since. Oaks seem to do this to overwhelm squirrels and ensure that a few acorns manage to germinate. Squirrels that can save acorns for years will do much better than squirrels that can only save enough for each winter.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Lots of tree species do this. They sync up and every few years overwhelm whatever eats their seeds.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - setr 5y ago
      So the same prey saturation strategy as cicadas? I wonder if that also produces a prime-number cycle preference
    - codeismath 5y ago
      Phenological event known as "masting": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany)
  - 1e-9 5y ago
    Similarly, periodical cicadas synchronously emerge in great numbers (more 370 per square meter) every 13th or 17th year.[1] This overwhelms predators and it's thought that the prime-numbered intervals prevent predators from synchronizing their reproductive cycles with that of the cicadas. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas
ravenstine 5y ago
Squirrels are really interesting critters. I have a funny memory of my then-girlfriend's brother and his wife showing us home video of their trip to America and her family was totally fascinated with the 20 minutes of squirrel footage. At first I didn't understand why anyone, even those in New Zealand (where there are no squirrels), would see squirrels with the same awe one would show on a trip to a zoo, but I thought about it more and realized how weird they are. For one, they seem to love roughhousing. Everyone has seen videos of squirrels being flung off of bird feeders by anti-squirrel devices, yet they love to come back for more. They'll go through great lengths just to get a single peanut, they're really daring too, but they're not stupid. My parents for a while constructed a squirrel obstacle course in their backyard and at first the squirrels are skeptical; they'll investigate, back off, come back and get a little closer, back off again until they get comfortable and then they figure it out. There's an unused dog-door at my parents' house and I suggested they extend part of their squirrel maze into their house through it. It was such a good idea they actually did it, and the squirrels did indeed come all the way into the house! They must have reasoned at some level that because those maze structures led to peanuts in the past that there could be a peanut inside the house where the maze lead. Of course this also lead birds like scrub jays observing the squirrels and entering the house as well! For creatures that are relatively vulnerable to predators, they will relax out in the open in really cartoonish ways. It's humorous when they lie on the edge of a fence with their limbs dangling over both sides. Periodically, my parents have to trim the pods off their palm trees which are quite tall now. Many of those peanuts the squirrels won from the obstacle course ended up at the top of those palms. It almost seems excessive given the amount of energy they seem to expend getting that food.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Wait is this also true of China? It would explain why I've seen so many chinese tourists filming squirrels all the time. I've always been a bit baffled.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    I had a group of Chinese grad students studying my black walnut trees, which was interesting in itself. They literally spent about two hours watching the squirrels go about their business.
Lamad123 5y ago
Squirrels have been prepping before preppers were a thing!
bloat 5y ago
I had a box of bird seed on a shelf in my garage, next to a box of nails. One day I go in, and see that all the nails are in a layer in the bird seed box, covering up the seed. I can only assume a squirrel did this.
mosfets 5y ago
Oh no, who caught me?!!
adamredwoods 5y ago
Last winter, we had a rat create a nest in our car. We would drive around during the day, so it would take advantage of the heat from the engine. We tried clearing the nest out night after night, but it kept building it in different areas near the engine. We even tried mint extract to keep it away, but that only worked for short periods of time and it would still come back. Traps were useless, even with peanut butter. Luckily, one day after a fresh snowfall, we noticed a trail of rat footprints, and then at the end of the trail, a dead, bloody rat. From the tracks we saw, it seems a feathered predator saw the rat and took care of problem.
- Larrikin 5y ago
  When I was a broke college student I lived in an apartment next to a vacant building. Once the vacant was bought all the mice that had been living there decided to come to our apartment. We tried some mice traps but didn't have much success and couldn't really afford to buy different types. After some research I discovered the toilet paper roll to to trash method. You setup stairs using boxes to a toilet paper roll with peanut butter on the end. The mouse goes to the end to get the peanut butter, the roll tips over before the mouse can back out and falls into the trash can What they don't say and was surprised by was that mice can jump nearly two feet into the air and was scared when one escaped. To solve the problem you fill the trash with enough water so the mouse can't jump not climb over the lip of the trash can. Most of the mice were trapped when I was at class but once when I was doing homework I found out mice can swim for about thirty minutes at full speed before they give up.
jasonhansel 5y ago
I've always been curious as to why squirrels have never been domesticated and bred to serve as pets. A wide variety of other rodents (mice, rats, hamsters) are already available as pets, having been domesticated over many generations, and it isn't obvious why no one has ever tried this with squirrels. Some quick research shows that a big part of the problem is diet: squirrels require a surprisingly complex and varied diet that is hard for pet owners to replicate. Getting them enough physical activity is also an issue. (Of course, one might suspect that it would be cruel to keep squirrels in such unnatural conditions, but the same could be said of most pets.) [edit: Apparently keeping wild, undomesticated squirrels as pets was popular at one point (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pet-squirrel-craze https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pet-squirrel-craze ). That article doesn't say why the trend died out, other than...all of the obvious reasons.] [edit 2: Would a squirrel raised indoors always think it was summer, or would they start storing and then digging up food as the year progressed even with no change in temperature? Might be relevant.]
- ascar 5y ago
  Haven't all large domesticated pets (i.e. those that can't be kept in a cage) been used for practical purposes for hundreds of years before they became mere pets in modern times? Like cats were used for pest control and dogs for all kinds of workloads.
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    Even weird tiny dog breeds usually have their origin in "we wanted a dog that could chase animals into their burrows".
    - BugWatch 5y ago
      Or to run a rotisserie. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog
    - Bayart 5y ago
      Terrier is quite literally French for "burrow". They still work great with rats, farmers love these dogs.
songzme 5y ago
Does anyone know what would happen to the squirrel if he/she realizes their entire year's of investment is gone? Does it have feelings to feel angry / sadness? Would the Squirrel likely starve (or if it was a breadwinner would the whole family starve), or would another squirrel help it out? If anyone has interesting resources to learn about squirrels that could help me investigate more please share.
- sayonaraman 5y ago
  I don’t know about squirrels but hamsters are known to hedge their “nest eggs” with crypto. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/crypto-trading-hamster-mr-goxx-is-up-over-16-since-june-11632855365 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/crypto-trading-hamster-mr-...
- shriphani 5y ago
  The ground squirrels (I see them mostly in South San Jose) live in multigenerational burrows and dont venture too far out. I bet they stumble upon other family members' caches.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  Squirrels are known to spy on each other and to steal each other's "investments." (Also, if one notices that another is watching, it will pretend like it's hiding the food here and then take it someplace else.)
  - TravHatesMe 5y ago
    apparently this is why they will pretend to bury/hide stuff in order to fake out other squirrels.
  - sourcesmith 5y ago
    Not just other squirrels. I have seen a magpie sitting on a wall waiting for a squirrel to finish burying its nut. Once the squirrel had finished, it descended to have a good poke around the burial area.
- joecool1029 5y ago
hodgesrm 5y ago
Ah, rodents and cars. Many years ago a mouse built a nest in one of the heating vents of my car. He lived there peacefully until I went on a climbing trip with friends in the Olympics. We were driving up a steep dirt road to the trailhead, and I turned on the heating to help cool the engine a bit. At some point it got too hot. The mouse jumped out of the vent onto the dashboard of the car to get some fresh air. It's hard to say who was more surprised: the mouse or the humans. We looked at him in stunned silence. He looked back. Nobody moved for what seemed like about a minute, thought it was probably more like a few seconds. Eventually one of my friends had the presence of mind to grab him and gently drop him out of the window into the bushes at the side of the road. Then we all laughed hysterically for about 10 minutes. For the rest of the trip you just had to say "the mouse..." and it started all over again. Live well, little mouse!
- celim307 5y ago
  Curious about what routes you climbed! I did Olympus but that was more glacier hopping than technical, I figured most of the technical multipitch was in the North cascades around index. Would love some recommendations as I just moved
  - hodgesrm 5y ago
    It was a trip up the West Fork of the Dosewallips to Mt Anderson (via Eel Glacier). Class three scrambling and glacier travel. Olympic routes are bushwhacks more than anything else. For real alpinism you want the North Cascades, e.g., Boston Basin/T-Bone Ridge or Mount Washington. Nowadays I mostly do randonee skiing, in which case Rainier, Baker, and Adams are fine destinations with world class descents.
- rectang 5y ago
  > Ah, rodents and cars. I have a Prius with solar cells on the roof which power a fan keeping the passenger compartment from getting too stifling while parked in the sun. An adventurous mouse exploring the engine went took a fateful fall and got shredded by that fan. Cost me several hundred dollars to get everything taken apart and cleaned, and I'm sure the tech earned that money.
jobu 5y ago
We had this happen to our truck when I was a kid. The exhaust pipe was packed from the catalytic converter back through the muffler. It took a bit to figure out what was going on and then I had to get under and cut holes in the exhaust pipe in a couple places until I found clear pipe. After that we started putting soup cans over the exhaust pipes if they were going to sit more than a day or two.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > After that we started putting soup cans over the exhaust pipes Thanks, good suggestion!
crawsome 5y ago
"Hacker News"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tuxone 5y ago
What’s wrong with that TrustArc cookies banner popup? I was able to dismiss it only if accepting everything.. maybe my adblock is blocking its requests?
- sega_sai 5y ago
  There were investigations showing that they add delay timers in order for you to accept.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  I’m in Europe and after I hit “no” on everything, it spent like 30s “processing”. Then I get this headscratcher: > This page transmits information using https protocol. Some vendors cannot receive opt-out requests via https protocols so the processing of your opt-out request is incomplete. To complete the opt-out process, please click here to resubmit your preferences. ???
- robocat 5y ago
  Starbucks and TrustArc add fake cookie processing delay if you don't click agree https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500092
- Accacin 5y ago
  Just having a look under the "Required Cookies" was enough to make me close the page.
tartoran 5y ago
Years ago a roommate was away on vacation and when he came back his room was ransacked: two jars of almonds were chewed through and almonds were all over the floor. It turns out squirrels entered through the AC exhaust pipe and did their thing. About 3/4 of the almonds were taken by the squirrels, it’s impossible that they ate them in the room, they must have stashed them somewhere else..
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
blunte 5y ago
Oh My God that Sinclair cookie stuff. I could never get to the actual article. Also I know they are a horrible media company, working against humanity in so many ways; but I digress. If there was ever an appropriate time to say it, it's now: Deez Nuts!
tzs 5y ago
I've pretty sure I've got at least 100 peanuts stashed in my garage from a Douglas squirrel that likes to hang around my place. I give her peanuts and for the last month or two she mostly has stashed them instead of eating them right away like she did earlier in the summer. And most of the time she stashes them, she does so somewhere in my garage. She runs the same general circuit most of the time, going up the left wall, crossing the rafters to the right, stashing the nuts somewhere up there (I haven't yet gotten around to getting a ladder and trying to find out just where she puts them), and then exiting somewhere on the right (she has a couple of different ways she comes down). Here she is running her garage circuit: https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/AIc43WuOR6qbKiadxWGOKw.Uz8-2kTPep3jr-i3MzmWGH/gallery/jePMgM6eRv-LEBmigx8-9g https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/AIc43WuOR6qbKiadxWGOKw.... As far as I've seen none of the eastern gray squirrels that are more common here use my garage. I've only ever seen them burying peanuts in my yard, or taking them somewhere off my property.
ilamont 5y ago
There's a recent survival TV show which had 10 people attempt to live off the land for 100 days in the Canadian far north in the fall and early winter (daytime temps started at 20C and went down to -20C during that time, nights were even colder). A few of the people found squirrels' mushroom stashes and ate them. Several people caught squirrels and ate them as well, but one got very sick and had to be evacuated early. It was also interesting to see the extent humans would go through to stash the food they had hunted or caught -- for instance, elevated platforms in the trees -- and the determination of animals such as bears, wolverines, and foxes to raid the stashes.
- jamal-kumar 5y ago
  That's basic camping 101 shit there. I think I read a couple months ago bout an old lady who got dragged out of her tent by a bear and killed because of improperly secured food[1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57763443 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57763443
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
The woodworker in me hopes that he keeps the nuts covered in those buckets for two months and gets rewarded with gallons of beautiful all natural walnut stain!
fortran77 5y ago
I feel a little bad for the squirrel. All that work wasted! I hope he makes it through the winter OK.
sporklpony 5y ago
We had a similar situation with cat food. The car was smelling like cat food, but we couldn't tell why, but when we took it in for servicing they found that the ventilation system was full of cat food. Turns out some small animal got into our extra bag of cat food in the garage, and decided it made more sense to store it in the car.
AuryGlenz 5y ago
Red squirrels once filled up my engine compartment with stuff, causing my accelerator to stick down at one point pretty close to full throttle on a highway. I had the presence of mind to just turn off the car, though to this day I wonder if I escaped a squirrel assassination.
growt 5y ago
I love HN! Bill gates gets a divorce - downvoted and banned, because it has nothing to do with tech. Squirrel stores nuts in parked truck - up to the frontpage with you!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rincebrain 5y ago
My aunt is a schoolteacher who lives in the NE US. Once, she had purchased candy corn along with other groceries, to take to class, but absentmindedly forgot to bring the plastic bag with the sealed bag of it inside. When she went out to the car the next day, there was no such bag to be found, leaving her rather confused as to how she could have left it somewhere. A few days later, when driving, she heard _something_ rolling around in the outside of the car, and after a few rounds of looking and seeing nothing visible, a few kernels of candy corn rolled along the floor where she could see. She took the car in, they went looking around, and went "...we can definitely tell there was _something_ living in there, but whatever it is, it's gone now. We've removed the candy corn we found." (It was not a whole bag, just a few dozen kernels. No sign of the bag that bag was in either.) Was something living in the car unnoticed before and smelled the bag, and extracted it to its home under the hood? (I've certainly observed areas with nothing but "sealed" bags of candy corn carrying the distinctive smell before.) Did something smell it from outside and find a way in? We will never know, but it was quite an odd experience to just find candy corn rolling along the floor from nowhere. Bonus recollection: Somehow, my family member's car was cursed in some way, and on multiple occasions, with the car located at different homes each time, a nest of bees was discovered in the frame. The first time, the car was parked near a house, and there were plenty of plants and naturally bees around, so that was unsurprising. The second time, it was living at an apartment complex without much foliage around at all, or any bees noticed anywhere. If it had been the same place, one might wonder if the first bees had returned, but it looks like that distance is usually very limited, and he had moved a good number of miles away. A "not mine" recollection: A certain car vendor had to have multiple recalls because it was found that spiders were invading the car, because the concentrations of gasoline vapor were high enough to attract certain spiders but not high enough to kill them, and they would sometimes weave webs that blocked key locations. (It was Mazda, if you want to look up more details.)

286 points by ohjeez 5y ago

> And to think this just happened over a few days the truck was parked. Suddenly the viral pictures of communication dishes packed to the brim with nuts becomes so much more believable.

paranoidrobot 5y ago
There's plenty of videos of opening microwave tower dishes to have an avalanche of nuts fall out to dispell any doubt that it happens.
myself248 5y ago
Had you not believed them before?

b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago

This is nuts I tell you.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

You know how you know this is a nice neighborhood? Because the squirrel lived long enough to cause such problems (also because this made the news).

BlasDeLezo 5y ago

Yes. They do that.

tomcam 5y ago

In tangentially related news, I have a huge, 250+ year-old black walnut tree here in Seattle. It bears one walnut a year, and this time a local chipmunk got it before I could. He then carried it up next to my second story deck and tormented me with it while I watched helplessly a roof away.

function_seven 5y ago
Tangent from yours: I have a very old pecan tree in my yard that'll easily fill a couple of 5-gallon buckets. More pecans than I could possibly want in a year. I thought this was great when I bought the place. Instead what I get to do is fill a couple of 5-gallon buckets with green, unripened nuts that the fucking squirrels decided to remove from the tree 2 months before they're ready. Last year I found exactly 0 viable nuts. They were all stripped off the tree before their time. I just convince myself that their happiness is my happiness. And the shade is still good.
- tomcam 5y ago
  Preach! We have lots and lots of blueberry bushes that are apparently here on earth only to feed deer. We've never managed to get a single blueberry. We do get a lot of beautiful deer (and coyotes, and bobcats, and raccoons, and bears).
  - don-code 5y ago
    That seems accurate. I have a mulberry tree (quite tall!), and if I don't pick mulberries every morning during its 4-week fruiting time, I just end up with purple poo all over my yard instead.
- danielodievich 5y ago
  Many years ago during one of the big corporate training events in room of about 80 people we had a little icebreaker activity, where we had to say something interesting about ourselves that nobody else knew. I don't remember what I or anyone else said, except for one lady. She was a high powered account executive or something, but as aside, she said she owned a peach and nut orchard somewhere in California, and she had a big permanently loaded shotgun in her car to "kill the f*cking squirrels" (her exact quote) as she drove through the property because otherwise "they'd get nothing at all". Great vivid picture and great icebreaker!
  - beezle 5y ago

Arrath 5y ago

Similarly, a pack rat once stripped all of the wire insulation foreword of the firewall and used it to built a nest in the engine bay of my dad's truck. Rather rude surprise to find when opening the hood to figure out why it wouldn't turn over.

lightlyused 5y ago

I had squirrels put black walnuts inside my engine, including the space in the hood so that they rolled out when I opened it to see the engine covered in nut pieces. I think they were responsible for the wiring issues I had with that car. Also found several boxes filled with black walnuts in my garage. I hate red squirrels.

tyingq 5y ago
Yes, it's common for squirrels to eat the wiring harness. More expensive these days since cars are so full of tightly packed wires in hard-to-get-to places.
- asdff 5y ago
  It's a big problem now that manufacturers use soy insulation for wires, which I guess is tasty if you are a rodent.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    IIRC, there was a class action lawsuit against an auto manufacturer that thought it was a good idea to use soy to insulate wires: https://www.autobodynews.com/index.php/industry-news/item/20979-toyota-soy-wiring-class-action-lawsuit-resurrected.html https://www.autobodynews.com/index.php/industry-news/item/20...
  - jonah 5y ago
    There exists Genuine Honda Rodent Tape which is part number: 4019-2317 (Random dealer site which lists it for sale: https://www.collegehillshonda.com/product/4019-2317.html https://www.collegehillshonda.com/product/4019-2317.html)
joecool1029 5y ago
> I hate red squirrels. Since most of HN doesn't know, there's a big difference between grey/fox squirrels that most people see running around outside and these red devils. I would argue most haven't even seen these, they are smaller, more skittish, and typically only live around areas that have a lot of pine trees. For one, red squirrels aren't quiet, they bark and chitter all the time for warning calls or territorial challenging. They aren't social so much as combative. Extremely territorial and destructive to housing. These are the ones that will eat through wood siding then destroy attic insulation on their quest to overwinter indoors and store tree nuts inside the walls. When it's not pecan nuts rolling by in walls, they are beating the shit out one another or barking and chittering as you or your pets are nearby. Sound, smells, ultrasonic, predator calls, all ineffective to get them to leave a space once they settle in. If they have young, you can't remove (either by relocation, plugging up the hole they made, or killing) until the young is out or they'll die and stink up the house. Even if you do plug a hole, they'll spend days trying to get back in barking and scratching the whole time. I can't think of a wild animal I hate more. Exterminators don't have a high success rate against them, traps are rarely effective (and they learn fast if they escape), and the amount of damage they cause is obscene.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

If you can figure out how, you can use it against them. Create an inviting place for a squirrel to store nuts. Let the squirrel harvest the nuts for you. Then collect them from the squirrel's stash. It's easier than gathering them off of the ground yourself every day.

chanux 5y ago
Maybe just take.. like 25% of it. Fair share xD

Stampo00 5y ago

I don't know how this got to #2 on HN of all places. But it makes me happy that it did.

lapetitejort 5y ago
A friendly reminder about the massive, yet commonplace, scale of nature that often goes unnoticed, until it inexplicably ruins someone's day.
chanux 5y ago
I loved all the squirrel stories and added mine too.

entangledqubit 5y ago

Maybe they need to wrap their truck in a tarp. :-) https://www.nps.gov/seki/planyourvisit/marmots.htm https://www.nps.gov/seki/planyourvisit/marmots.htm

latchkey 5y ago
"Wrapping vehicle in chicken wire is no longer advised."
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  Animals are too smart. Designs for bear boxes used to carry food for backcountry camping have to be regularly tested as given enough exposure, bears will figure out how to open them and eat all the tasty granola bars inside.

pvaldes 5y ago

Squirrel can't stop and will not stop. Needs the vault to survive in winter. The man could consider to put a big squirrel box near on a tree from the garden and put all the nuts inside. That would made a nice Christmas history. Is amazing how many nuts the squirrel has harvested.

cryptonector 5y ago
Not just winter. Oaks produce huge numbers of acorns about one season every 7 years. My yard had thousands and thousands a few years ago, for example, but very few since. Oaks seem to do this to overwhelm squirrels and ensure that a few acorns manage to germinate. Squirrels that can save acorns for years will do much better than squirrels that can only save enough for each winter.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Lots of tree species do this. They sync up and every few years overwhelm whatever eats their seeds.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - setr 5y ago
    So the same prey saturation strategy as cicadas? I wonder if that also produces a prime-number cycle preference
  - codeismath 5y ago
    Phenological event known as "masting": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany)
- 1e-9 5y ago
  Similarly, periodical cicadas synchronously emerge in great numbers (more 370 per square meter) every 13th or 17th year.[1] This overwhelms predators and it's thought that the prime-numbered intervals prevent predators from synchronizing their reproductive cycles with that of the cicadas. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas

ravenstine 5y ago

Squirrels are really interesting critters. I have a funny memory of my then-girlfriend's brother and his wife showing us home video of their trip to America and her family was totally fascinated with the 20 minutes of squirrel footage. At first I didn't understand why anyone, even those in New Zealand (where there are no squirrels), would see squirrels with the same awe one would show on a trip to a zoo, but I thought about it more and realized how weird they are. For one, they seem to love roughhousing. Everyone has seen videos of squirrels being flung off of bird feeders by anti-squirrel devices, yet they love to come back for more. They'll go through great lengths just to get a single peanut, they're really daring too, but they're not stupid. My parents for a while constructed a squirrel obstacle course in their backyard and at first the squirrels are skeptical; they'll investigate, back off, come back and get a little closer, back off again until they get comfortable and then they figure it out. There's an unused dog-door at my parents' house and I suggested they extend part of their squirrel maze into their house through it. It was such a good idea they actually did it, and the squirrels did indeed come all the way into the house! They must have reasoned at some level that because those maze structures led to peanuts in the past that there could be a peanut inside the house where the maze lead. Of course this also lead birds like scrub jays observing the squirrels and entering the house as well! For creatures that are relatively vulnerable to predators, they will relax out in the open in really cartoonish ways. It's humorous when they lie on the edge of a fence with their limbs dangling over both sides. Periodically, my parents have to trim the pods off their palm trees which are quite tall now. Many of those peanuts the squirrels won from the obstacle course ended up at the top of those palms. It almost seems excessive given the amount of energy they seem to expend getting that food.

whimsicalism 5y ago
Wait is this also true of China? It would explain why I've seen so many chinese tourists filming squirrels all the time. I've always been a bit baffled.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  I had a group of Chinese grad students studying my black walnut trees, which was interesting in itself. They literally spent about two hours watching the squirrels go about their business.

Lamad123 5y ago

Squirrels have been prepping before preppers were a thing!

bloat 5y ago

I had a box of bird seed on a shelf in my garage, next to a box of nails. One day I go in, and see that all the nails are in a layer in the bird seed box, covering up the seed. I can only assume a squirrel did this.

mosfets 5y ago

Oh no, who caught me?!!

adamredwoods 5y ago

Last winter, we had a rat create a nest in our car. We would drive around during the day, so it would take advantage of the heat from the engine. We tried clearing the nest out night after night, but it kept building it in different areas near the engine. We even tried mint extract to keep it away, but that only worked for short periods of time and it would still come back. Traps were useless, even with peanut butter. Luckily, one day after a fresh snowfall, we noticed a trail of rat footprints, and then at the end of the trail, a dead, bloody rat. From the tracks we saw, it seems a feathered predator saw the rat and took care of problem.

Larrikin 5y ago
When I was a broke college student I lived in an apartment next to a vacant building. Once the vacant was bought all the mice that had been living there decided to come to our apartment. We tried some mice traps but didn't have much success and couldn't really afford to buy different types. After some research I discovered the toilet paper roll to to trash method. You setup stairs using boxes to a toilet paper roll with peanut butter on the end. The mouse goes to the end to get the peanut butter, the roll tips over before the mouse can back out and falls into the trash can What they don't say and was surprised by was that mice can jump nearly two feet into the air and was scared when one escaped. To solve the problem you fill the trash with enough water so the mouse can't jump not climb over the lip of the trash can. Most of the mice were trapped when I was at class but once when I was doing homework I found out mice can swim for about thirty minutes at full speed before they give up.

jasonhansel 5y ago

I've always been curious as to why squirrels have never been domesticated and bred to serve as pets. A wide variety of other rodents (mice, rats, hamsters) are already available as pets, having been domesticated over many generations, and it isn't obvious why no one has ever tried this with squirrels. Some quick research shows that a big part of the problem is diet: squirrels require a surprisingly complex and varied diet that is hard for pet owners to replicate. Getting them enough physical activity is also an issue. (Of course, one might suspect that it would be cruel to keep squirrels in such unnatural conditions, but the same could be said of most pets.) [edit: Apparently keeping wild, undomesticated squirrels as pets was popular at one point (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pet-squirrel-craze https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pet-squirrel-craze ). That article doesn't say why the trend died out, other than...all of the obvious reasons.] [edit 2: Would a squirrel raised indoors always think it was summer, or would they start storing and then digging up food as the year progressed even with no change in temperature? Might be relevant.]

ascar 5y ago
Haven't all large domesticated pets (i.e. those that can't be kept in a cage) been used for practical purposes for hundreds of years before they became mere pets in modern times? Like cats were used for pest control and dogs for all kinds of workloads.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  Even weird tiny dog breeds usually have their origin in "we wanted a dog that could chase animals into their burrows".
  - BugWatch 5y ago
    Or to run a rotisserie. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog
  - Bayart 5y ago
    Terrier is quite literally French for "burrow". They still work great with rats, farmers love these dogs.

songzme 5y ago

Does anyone know what would happen to the squirrel if he/she realizes their entire year's of investment is gone? Does it have feelings to feel angry / sadness? Would the Squirrel likely starve (or if it was a breadwinner would the whole family starve), or would another squirrel help it out? If anyone has interesting resources to learn about squirrels that could help me investigate more please share.

sayonaraman 5y ago
I don’t know about squirrels but hamsters are known to hedge their “nest eggs” with crypto. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/crypto-trading-hamster-mr-goxx-is-up-over-16-since-june-11632855365 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/crypto-trading-hamster-mr-...
shriphani 5y ago
The ground squirrels (I see them mostly in South San Jose) live in multigenerational burrows and dont venture too far out. I bet they stumble upon other family members' caches.
Koshkin 5y ago
Squirrels are known to spy on each other and to steal each other's "investments." (Also, if one notices that another is watching, it will pretend like it's hiding the food here and then take it someplace else.)
- TravHatesMe 5y ago
  apparently this is why they will pretend to bury/hide stuff in order to fake out other squirrels.
- sourcesmith 5y ago
  Not just other squirrels. I have seen a magpie sitting on a wall waiting for a squirrel to finish burying its nut. Once the squirrel had finished, it descended to have a good poke around the burial area.
joecool1029 5y ago

hodgesrm 5y ago

Ah, rodents and cars. Many years ago a mouse built a nest in one of the heating vents of my car. He lived there peacefully until I went on a climbing trip with friends in the Olympics. We were driving up a steep dirt road to the trailhead, and I turned on the heating to help cool the engine a bit. At some point it got too hot. The mouse jumped out of the vent onto the dashboard of the car to get some fresh air. It's hard to say who was more surprised: the mouse or the humans. We looked at him in stunned silence. He looked back. Nobody moved for what seemed like about a minute, thought it was probably more like a few seconds. Eventually one of my friends had the presence of mind to grab him and gently drop him out of the window into the bushes at the side of the road. Then we all laughed hysterically for about 10 minutes. For the rest of the trip you just had to say "the mouse..." and it started all over again. Live well, little mouse!

celim307 5y ago
Curious about what routes you climbed! I did Olympus but that was more glacier hopping than technical, I figured most of the technical multipitch was in the North cascades around index. Would love some recommendations as I just moved
- hodgesrm 5y ago
  It was a trip up the West Fork of the Dosewallips to Mt Anderson (via Eel Glacier). Class three scrambling and glacier travel. Olympic routes are bushwhacks more than anything else. For real alpinism you want the North Cascades, e.g., Boston Basin/T-Bone Ridge or Mount Washington. Nowadays I mostly do randonee skiing, in which case Rainier, Baker, and Adams are fine destinations with world class descents.
rectang 5y ago
> Ah, rodents and cars. I have a Prius with solar cells on the roof which power a fan keeping the passenger compartment from getting too stifling while parked in the sun. An adventurous mouse exploring the engine went took a fateful fall and got shredded by that fan. Cost me several hundred dollars to get everything taken apart and cleaned, and I'm sure the tech earned that money.

jobu 5y ago

We had this happen to our truck when I was a kid. The exhaust pipe was packed from the catalytic converter back through the muffler. It took a bit to figure out what was going on and then I had to get under and cut holes in the exhaust pipe in a couple places until I found clear pipe. After that we started putting soup cans over the exhaust pipes if they were going to sit more than a day or two.

redis_mlc 5y ago
> After that we started putting soup cans over the exhaust pipes Thanks, good suggestion!

crawsome 5y ago

"Hacker News"

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tuxone 5y ago

What’s wrong with that TrustArc cookies banner popup? I was able to dismiss it only if accepting everything.. maybe my adblock is blocking its requests?

sega_sai 5y ago
There were investigations showing that they add delay timers in order for you to accept.
Scoundreller 5y ago
I’m in Europe and after I hit “no” on everything, it spent like 30s “processing”. Then I get this headscratcher: > This page transmits information using https protocol. Some vendors cannot receive opt-out requests via https protocols so the processing of your opt-out request is incomplete. To complete the opt-out process, please click here to resubmit your preferences. ???
robocat 5y ago
Starbucks and TrustArc add fake cookie processing delay if you don't click agree https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500092
Accacin 5y ago
Just having a look under the "Required Cookies" was enough to make me close the page.

tartoran 5y ago

Years ago a roommate was away on vacation and when he came back his room was ransacked: two jars of almonds were chewed through and almonds were all over the floor. It turns out squirrels entered through the AC exhaust pipe and did their thing. About 3/4 of the almonds were taken by the squirrels, it’s impossible that they ate them in the room, they must have stashed them somewhere else..

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blunte 5y ago

Oh My God that Sinclair cookie stuff. I could never get to the actual article. Also I know they are a horrible media company, working against humanity in so many ways; but I digress. If there was ever an appropriate time to say it, it's now: Deez Nuts!

tzs 5y ago

I've pretty sure I've got at least 100 peanuts stashed in my garage from a Douglas squirrel that likes to hang around my place. I give her peanuts and for the last month or two she mostly has stashed them instead of eating them right away like she did earlier in the summer. And most of the time she stashes them, she does so somewhere in my garage. She runs the same general circuit most of the time, going up the left wall, crossing the rafters to the right, stashing the nuts somewhere up there (I haven't yet gotten around to getting a ladder and trying to find out just where she puts them), and then exiting somewhere on the right (she has a couple of different ways she comes down). Here she is running her garage circuit: https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/AIc43WuOR6qbKiadxWGOKw.Uz8-2kTPep3jr-i3MzmWGH/gallery/jePMgM6eRv-LEBmigx8-9g https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/AIc43WuOR6qbKiadxWGOKw.... As far as I've seen none of the eastern gray squirrels that are more common here use my garage. I've only ever seen them burying peanuts in my yard, or taking them somewhere off my property.

ilamont 5y ago

There's a recent survival TV show which had 10 people attempt to live off the land for 100 days in the Canadian far north in the fall and early winter (daytime temps started at 20C and went down to -20C during that time, nights were even colder). A few of the people found squirrels' mushroom stashes and ate them. Several people caught squirrels and ate them as well, but one got very sick and had to be evacuated early. It was also interesting to see the extent humans would go through to stash the food they had hunted or caught -- for instance, elevated platforms in the trees -- and the determination of animals such as bears, wolverines, and foxes to raid the stashes.

jamal-kumar 5y ago
That's basic camping 101 shit there. I think I read a couple months ago bout an old lady who got dragged out of her tent by a bear and killed because of improperly secured food[1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57763443 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57763443

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

The woodworker in me hopes that he keeps the nuts covered in those buckets for two months and gets rewarded with gallons of beautiful all natural walnut stain!

fortran77 5y ago

I feel a little bad for the squirrel. All that work wasted! I hope he makes it through the winter OK.

sporklpony 5y ago

We had a similar situation with cat food. The car was smelling like cat food, but we couldn't tell why, but when we took it in for servicing they found that the ventilation system was full of cat food. Turns out some small animal got into our extra bag of cat food in the garage, and decided it made more sense to store it in the car.

AuryGlenz 5y ago

Red squirrels once filled up my engine compartment with stuff, causing my accelerator to stick down at one point pretty close to full throttle on a highway. I had the presence of mind to just turn off the car, though to this day I wonder if I escaped a squirrel assassination.

growt 5y ago

I love HN! Bill gates gets a divorce - downvoted and banned, because it has nothing to do with tech. Squirrel stores nuts in parked truck - up to the frontpage with you!

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rincebrain 5y ago

My aunt is a schoolteacher who lives in the NE US. Once, she had purchased candy corn along with other groceries, to take to class, but absentmindedly forgot to bring the plastic bag with the sealed bag of it inside. When she went out to the car the next day, there was no such bag to be found, leaving her rather confused as to how she could have left it somewhere. A few days later, when driving, she heard _something_ rolling around in the outside of the car, and after a few rounds of looking and seeing nothing visible, a few kernels of candy corn rolled along the floor where she could see. She took the car in, they went looking around, and went "...we can definitely tell there was _something_ living in there, but whatever it is, it's gone now. We've removed the candy corn we found." (It was not a whole bag, just a few dozen kernels. No sign of the bag that bag was in either.) Was something living in the car unnoticed before and smelled the bag, and extracted it to its home under the hood? (I've certainly observed areas with nothing but "sealed" bags of candy corn carrying the distinctive smell before.) Did something smell it from outside and find a way in? We will never know, but it was quite an odd experience to just find candy corn rolling along the floor from nowhere. Bonus recollection: Somehow, my family member's car was cursed in some way, and on multiple occasions, with the car located at different homes each time, a nest of bees was discovered in the frame. The first time, the car was parked near a house, and there were plenty of plants and naturally bees around, so that was unsurprising. The second time, it was living at an apartment complex without much foliage around at all, or any bees noticed anywhere. If it had been the same place, one might wonder if the first bees had returned, but it looks like that distance is usually very limited, and he had moved a good number of miles away. A "not mine" recollection: A certain car vendor had to have multiple recalls because it was found that spiders were invading the car, because the concentrations of gasoline vapor were high enough to attract certain spiders but not high enough to kill them, and they would sometimes weave webs that blocked key locations. (It was Mazda, if you want to look up more details.)