12 November 2025
It’s that time of year again when squirrels are suicidal, or so it seems. They watch from the side of the road as your car approaches, dart in front of you, stop in front of you, and then zig zag back and forth in place. If you and the squirrel are both lucky, the squirrel runs out of your way at the last minute.
Squirrels even do this in front of bicycles. In the slow motion part of this video you can see the squirrel pause, zig zag in front of the bike and finally exit left at the last minute.
Why do they do this, and why now especially?
“Why now?” is easy. Squirrels are very busy gathering nuts for the winter and have to cross the street more often.
You would think squirrels would learn that darting in the street leads to death. They do, after all, solve complex problems at your bird feeders every day. But they don’t learn this one.
I think they zig zag in the street because … they’re afraid of cars!
The zig zag behavior is how squirrels evade predators. They react to cars in the same way they handle encounters with animals that want to kill them. Here’s who taught them this maneuver.
When squirrels evolved in North America 36 million years ago, hawks had already been around for more than 90 million years. Squirrels have always been afraid of hawks and have 36 million years of learning how to evade them.
Darting back and forth works best because the hawk (or even a fox) cannot to pinpoint the squirrel’s location to come in for the kill. The closer the predator, the more the squirrels dart.
At the roadside we humans are taught to wait until the car passes, but for a squirrel waiting can turn you into dinner and so can turning your back and running away.
My guess is that squirrels do know that cars are dangerous and use their best evasive tactic. It just happens to be exactly the wrong thing to do.
Read more about squirrel evasion tactics at: Illinois State University: Ask a Redbird Scholar: What’s up with squirrels and cars?
p.s. It turns out that squirrels think noisy roads are a safer place to be 😮 A recent study in southeast England found that gray squirrels feel safer from predators when they are close to human activity, especially when close to very noisy roads, the noisier the better. See: Animals’ “landscape of fear” gets weird when people enter the equation.
Our state park has a curious habit amongst the gray squirrels. They are in the middle of the road, seemingly eating……what? They appear as a leaf until you’re right upon them, and then we realize it’s a squirrel. What are they eating? Nothing ever appears to be there.
I think they have a death wish. On two separate occasions I killed squirrels driving really slow in a cemetery.
Fascinating! I appreciate that people study this stuff. Maybe we’ll be able to figure out a good way to reduce roadkill one of these days. I’ve seen one too many dead young raccoons this year.
This was interesting and makes perfect sense.
Oh my — that might explain my recent squirrel encounter in North Park! One ran out in front of me, and I did my normal “slow way down and beep at the critter” thing, hoping to scare it into leaving the road. Instead, it started darting, and I was afraid I might have hit it. When I checked the rearview mirror, the squirrel was still alive, and finished crossing the road — but it was dragging its tail! I think I ran over the tail and caused some damage.
Hope the poor little guy recovered.