When ground squirrels cry badger
By Susan Milius
The boy who cries wolf isn’t the only one who loses credibility. Burrowing squirrels known as Richardson’s ground squirrels pay less attention to alarms from a neighbor associated with false signals than to calls from a source with a better record, says James F. Hare of University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
A group of these ground squirrels shares a tangle of tunnels, and any squirrel that spots a badger, coyote, or other menace gives a call that Hare describes as sounding a lot like “eek.” Hare had accidentally discovered that he could elicit eeks by tossing his hat toward a youngster.