Researchers uncover how squirrels locate their buried nut caches

As someone who routinely “hides” things from myself—car keys, receipts, even my phone while I’m actively talking on it—I felt instantly validated by Sarah Silverman’s joke that squirrels forget where they bury 80 percent of their nuts. “And that’s now trees are planted!” Silverman concludes in her 2021 Netflix special, A Speck of Dust.

If these bold, bushy-tailed little trainwrecks are able to thrive despite that kind of chaos, I figured there might be hope for me: Turns out, it was too good to be true.