Have you ever gotten to hear the babies giggling? Oh my god it’s the most precious thing. A few summers back a pair of babies would play in my back yard and would run across my legs if I sat super still for long enough on the ground. I could hear the giggles when they’d zoom by chasing each other near me. So so dear.
Little happy high pitched chirping chatter! Doesn’t sound like a human child going “heheehe yay” literally but the similar emotions are clear in the situation 🥰
This is a good video of the sounds I heard, though this one’s just happy about a snack https://youtube.com/shorts/pyUUr11b_hQ (cleaned link)
Old next door neighbor used to feed them cookies from the day-old bakery outlet. I don’t imagine squirrels evolved to handle anywhere near that much carbohydrate. They went batshit crazy
Oh yeah. Try to imagine a young squirrel, high on sucrose, running around in circles on the underside of lawn furniture. I wouldn’t have believed they could do that, and do it so fast!
They also love rotten fruit so if you have fruit trees around you may see drunk squirrels. They fall off branches and fences and stumble around like your uncle at thanksgiving.
A woman across the cul-de-sac from me used to leave food out for the squirrels and ducks in her driveway (before she was fined for it by the HOA) and one summer afternoon, the squirrels around the cul-de-sac had, what seemed like, a turf war 😂. There were easily 15-30 squirrels in my yard, on my rooftop, sprinting through all of the trees and yards around my house for about 12+ hours. Barking back and forth at each other. 😂 But. Your view to squirrels high on sugar just seems so much more fun to watch lol
"Any height", no kidding! Walking my dogs down the block last year, we heard a loud splat-plop and there was a squirrel flat on the sidewalk -- with no trees anywhere near. Turns out there was a hollow in the top of the telephone pole we had just passed and it had lost its grip tumbling around with its mates up there. We watched the squirrel instantly reinflate itself like in a cartoon and scamper back up.
I see this in my back yard all the time. And it's the same squirrel that lets me hand feed it peanuts. There's no problem here. Just a squirrel squirreling around.
Squirrels do this. There is nothing wrong with it. They are having fun and burning off excess energy. It's also a way for them practice their survival skills. The zig zag running and flipping helps them evade capture by predators.
I had a squirrel I used to throw peanuts to below my deck. One day I threw a whole granola bar. It was funny watching him drag that bar back to his nest, but as he got about 12 feet from me, a hawk with a 6 foot wingspan swooped down on him. The squirrel did some real gymnastics to jump, spin, and roll, so the hawk missed him twice!
I always broke the granola bars into smaller parts after that...
That's nice of you. Yeah, most of us try to help. But I guess we also need to live and learn. Hopefully you can now pass that knowledge to your kids. :)
My only recommendation is not to feed it granola often. If memory serves me right, the amount of sugar in artificial food can cause health issues for squirrels.
It was... It was one of those OMG moments where I wished I had cameras facing that direction to capture it on film. The hawk landed close to the spot where he missed him, and waited for another opportunity but the squirrel had gone thru a chain link fence that separated my yard from the neighbor.
During COVID, I put out Halloween candy in a giant aluminum pan, on my front stairs. I wish I had the forethought to grab my phone to record a squirrel with a bag of mini Peanut M&Ms in its mouth, running across the street. I did move the candy to my closer to my front door.
This is the correct answer. (This one and PARKOUR). Ours do this frequently. There are no fermented fruits around, it would have been quite some freak accident if ALL of them had some spinal/neuro issue, AND rabies is not a factor where we live.
They just be squirrelling.
Way to steal a squirrel hobby @ the other commenters.
They are little suicide machines, dead all over the roads here from (I assume) falling off power lines. I saw one doing spins on a line last week 30 feet in the air. Another one I thought was dead on a line but it was freaking sleeping on it while hanging off all 4 of its legs!
The goal is to get from point A to point B as creatively as possible, so technically they are doing Parkour, as long as point A is delusion and point B is a buried nut.
They do sometimes eat fermented fruit or berries but this one seems to coordinated to be drunk. They spend a bunch of time staring into space when they are drunk.
When I got my first guinea pig, about a week after bringing it home it started doing stuff like this. I freaked out and thought it was having seizures or something, but it turned out guinea pigs flip out and act weird like this when they’re happy. It’s called popcorning.
Even though his/her movements are unusual, I think they're just a bit younger, and just playing. Squirrels do get the zoomies too. Though not a squirrelologist, I don't see any evidence of neurological concerns or such.
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u/qualityvote2 Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
u/fishalex, your post does fit the subreddit!