TIL that squirrel moms can carry their young

I was working on my car in a parking lot lined by some big oak trees. Two squirrels were chasing each other through the top of a tree, when one of them launched into space from at least 50 feet over the pavement. 

He made quite the splatting sound when he landed. I walked over to look at him. He was totally still, eye open and unfocused, and not breathing.

I started thinking about where to locate a shovel, when that eye suddenly focused on me. A second later he was up running in circles trying to get away from me.

In reply to Woody :

I was pointed at that by a physics prof 30+ years ago and it stayed with me - much more than the physics did

CJ (He's Just an FS) said:

J.B.S. Haldane, was a scientist known for his work in the study of physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and mathematics. He made innovative contributions to the fields of statistics and biostatistics.  In 1926, he wrote On Being the Right SIze.  It's well worth a read.

Here are a few of his observations:

Gravity, .... To the mouse and any smaller animal it presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal's length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.

An insect, therefore, is not afraid of gravity; it can fall without danger, and can cling to the ceiling with remarkably little trouble. It can go in for elegant and fantastic forms of support like that of the daddy-longlegs. But there is a force which is as formidable to an insect as gravitation to a mammal. This is surface tension. A man coming out of a bath carries with him a film of water about one-fiftieth of an inch in thickness. This weighs roughly a pound. A wet mouse has to carry about its own weight of water. A wet fly has to lift many times its own weight and, as everyone knows, a fly once wetted by water or any other liquid is in a very serious position indeed. An insect going for a drink is in a great danger as man leaning out over a precipice in search of food. If it once falls into the grip of the surface tension of the water -that is to say, gets wet - it is likely to remain so until it downs. A few insects, such as water-beetles, contrive to be unwettable; the majority keep well away from their drink by means of a long proboscis.

On Being the Right Size

 

Thanks for the share.

Woody said:

I was hiking with a friend from Germany when a squirrel crossed our path. I asked her what they were called in German, and she said, "Eichhörnchen".

No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't pronounce it correctly. She said she didn't think that the sounds of the second and third syllables exist in English.

Then she asked me what we called them, and I said, "Squirrels". She absolutely could not pronounce that word.

Up to that point, I had never thought about what a strange little word that is.

Remembering this thread from last year I knew it was canoe, but had to check just to see how it tied in.  Pretty impressively actually.