Squirrels Are Accidentally Planting Forests

Every autumn, squirrels become obsessed hoarders. A single grey squirrel can bury up to 10,000 nuts in a season, tucking them into shallow holes across their territory. But here's the twist: they're terrible at finding them again.

Research suggests squirrels fail to recover 50 to 74 percent of their buried treasure. That's not a minor oversight—it's thousands of forgotten nuts per squirrel, every single year.

Memory Isn't Their Strong Suit

Scientists once believed squirrels had photographic memories for their caches. The reality is messier. While squirrels do use spatial memory and landmarks to relocate nuts, they're working against serious odds. They bury nuts across areas spanning several acres, often in hundreds of different spots.

They also face competition. Other squirrels, birds, and rodents raid caches constantly. Some studies estimate 25 percent of buried nuts get stolen by rivals who watched the burial happen.

Accidental Conservationists

Here's where squirrel forgetfulness becomes genuinely remarkable. Those forgotten nuts? They sprout.

Researchers estimate that squirrels are responsible for planting millions of trees annually across North America alone. Oak forests, in particular, owe much of their spread to scatter-hoarding squirrels who never came back for their acorns.

This makes squirrels one of nature's most effective—if unintentional—reforestation agents. A single squirrel's lifetime of forgetfulness can establish dozens of mature trees.

The Bury-and-Forget Strategy

Not all hoarding is equal. Squirrels use two main strategies:

• Larder hoarding: Storing everything in one location (risky if discovered)
• Scatter hoarding: Spreading nuts across many sites (safer but harder to track)

Most tree squirrels are scatter hoarders, which explains the memory problem. It's not that squirrels are particularly forgetful—it's that their survival strategy involves burying more than they could ever possibly eat, accepting that losses are inevitable.

The nuts they do find again aren't always remembered directly. Squirrels use a combination of smell, spatial memory, and sheer luck to relocate caches. In winter, they can detect buried nuts under a foot of snow by scent alone.

Evolution's Happy Accident

From an evolutionary perspective, this "flaw" is actually a feature. Squirrels that bury excess nuts survive harsh winters better than those who store just enough. The forgotten percentage is essentially payment to the ecosystem—a tax that funds the next generation of forests.

So the next time you see a squirrel frantically burying an acorn, know this: there's roughly a coin-flip chance that acorn becomes a tree instead of a meal. And forests across the world exist because of it.