ABSTRACT

At breakfast on a recent morning my wife and I were observing the behavior of one of the several squirrels who frequent our back yard. This particular squirrel was busily engaged in a rather interesting bit of behavior. He was taking pieces of the bread we had thrown out (for the birds), removing them from the snow-covered ground, and depositing them on a portion of the branch of a nearby pine tree, some feet above the ground and in a spot that was well concealed by pine needles. He made repeated round trips. The behavior was objectively adaptive from at least two standpoints: (1) The ground was rather slushy, and the bread was becoming quite soggy from water absorption as it lay there. (2) The removal of the bread to a concealed location prevented its being eaten by the birds and by other squirrels, of whom there were several in the vicinity. When our squirrel could find no more bread, he repaired to his depository in the tree and proceeded to feast upon his cache. Altogether a quite impressive performance. Now, it happens that through the years my wife has learned not 58to ask me questions of a psychological nature, and I must presume that this is because my answers have usually not been very satisfactory. On this occasion, however, she took me by surprise and asked me how it was that a squirrel could do that! I stammered for a moment, and then made some none-too-intelligible remarks about well-known hoarding instincts of certain animals, the preprograming of astonishingly complex behaviors in the genetic materials, the possibilities of chained operant reinforcement learning, and so on. I think she realized before I did that I didn’t really have much faith in any of these answers. The fact is that I do not have any strong conviction that I know how the squirrel comes to do what he does.