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.

28 September 2025

Jaguars are rare in Mexico and appeared to be on the brink of extinction when Gerardo Ceballos and his team from the National Alliance for Jaguar Conservation (ANCJ) conducted a nationwide survey in 2010. They were surprised to find 4,100 — four times as many jaguars as they expected. The big cats were Endangered but there was hope.

Jaguars (Panthera onca), native to Central and South America, are the third largest big cat in the world and have a common genetic ancestor with lions and leopards.

Mexico’s small jaguar population is at the northern edge of the range and as close as they come to the U.S. The jaguar’s stronghold is in the South American rainforest and the Pantanal.

After the 2010 census results, ANCJ embarked on a Mexico jaguar conservation campaign to maintain protected areas, reduce jaguar conflict with cattle ranchers, and increase public awareness of jaguars. Then they counted again.

The [2024] census took place over 90 days across 15 states, using 920 motion-capture cameras and involving nearly 50 researchers as well as local community leaders. Researchers looked at an area of 414,000 hectares, making it the largest census for any mammal in Mexico.

— The Guardian: ‘We’re winning a battle’: Mexico’s jaguar numbers up 30% in conservation drive

In good photos the scientists could avoid double counting because the jaguar’s spots are unique per individual. Their rosette spots have small spots inside them and the pattern and arrangement of rosettes is unique.

Some jaguars even have long dark spots along their backbones.

Happily the new count totaled 5,326 jaguars, a 30% increase!

Jaguars were found across the country, with the largest number in the Yucatán peninsula region (1,699), followed by the south Pacific area (1,541), north-east and central Mexico (813), the north Pacific (733) and the central Pacific coast (540).

— The Guardian: ‘We’re winning a battle’: Mexico’s jaguar numbers up 30% in conservation drive

Mexico will continue conservation efforts to increase their jaguar population. Fingers crossed that the population continues to grow.

The jaguar is listed Near Threatened by the IUCN because of deforestation & human conflict throughout its range.

26 September 2025

Today I’m taking a break from outdoor stuff to look at an indoor mammal and sleep cycles.

Unlike our society, where humans are expected to have one long sleep period per day(*), cats sleep many times a day in periods lasting 50-113 minutes. They often sleep while we’re awake and wake while we’re asleep. What do they do when we’re not watching?

(video is faster than real time)

When the humans sleep.. ? pic.twitter.com/RwaTW9M6KX

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 14, 2024

Familiarity with the robot can breed contempt. This video shows two cats in a dominance face-off — notice their ears! The dominant (black) cat is busy intimidating his fellow cat and wants no interruptions from the robot. With one gesture he sends it away.

video embedded from @dkennylove on YouTube

P.S. (*) More information on sleep cycles:

• Cat sleep cycles are called polyphasic sleep — many phases per day.
• Monophasic sleep (just one long sleep bout) is expected of adults in our society.
• Other societies expect a daily nap or siesta (biphasic sleep). In Japan and China, these nations view napping at work as an expected norm and something that is beneficial.
• Wikipedia explains: Polyphasic sleep is common in many animals, and is believed to be the ancestral sleep state for mammals, although simians (our branch of primates) are monophasic.

1 September 2025

Many animals work for humans including sniffer dogs who use their sense of smell to detect explosives and illegal drugs. Landmine fields make land unusable in many parts of the world and can be too dangerous for dogs to work in because their weight can set off the explosives. The APOPO organization in Tanzania has the answer: Southern giant pouched rats.

Native to southern Africa, the southern giant pouched rat (Cricetomys ansorgei) weighs 2.6-4.4 pounds and is 28-31 inches from nose to tail tip. This is large for a rat but lightweight compared to a sniffer dog. Though he cannot see well he has an excellent sense of smell and is quite trainable. All he needs is a banana reward to keep on sniffing. Sometimes he gobbles it up and stores it in the very large cheek pouches that gave him his name.

Called HeroRATs by APOPO: “A HeroRAT can search an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes – a human deminer with a metal detector can take up to 4 days.”

Cambodia has one of the highest landmine concentrations in the world left over from the Vietnam War, their civil war, the Khmer Rouge, and continuing civil strife. These videos tell the story of HeroRATs in Cambodia.

The HeroRAT “mine sweeps” by running transects across the suspect area. When he detects a landmine, he lightly scratches the ground above it to signal to his handler that he’s found something. (No landmines in this video.)

HeroRATs have also been taught to detect tuberculosis in sputum (100 samples in 20 mins instead of 4 days) and poached animal parts in illegal wildlife trafficking.

Just recently a team of HeroRATs trained to find humans trapped under earthquake rubble has been stationed in Turkey.

Read more at APOPO: We Train Rats to Save Lives.

p.s. The acronym APOPO comes from Dutch: Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling = Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development