You know when you stare at cute things for too long and they start to look creepy? I’m thinking garden gnomes, baby dolls, any child in a princess outfit and all cats. Well, now there’s another one to add to the list.
The tufted ground squirrel (Rheithrosciurus macrotis) might look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but according to the Dayak hunters of Borneo where it lives, it’s a cold-blooded killer.
Dubbed the “vampire squirrel,” the ruthless rodent is said to hurl itself onto the backs of passing deer, use its razor-sharp teeth to slash through the jugular vein and then leave the animals to bleed to death.
Locals who have discovered disembowelled deer carcasses in forests believe that the squirrels then return to the kill site and feast on the deer’s heart, liver and stomach contents.
Meanwhile, in villages close to the forest’s edge, tufted ground squirrels are said to kill domestic chickens and gorge on their hearts and livers.
The squirrel rose to notoriety in 2014, after a 15-year-old girl called Emily Meijaard wrote an academic paper about it with her parents.
The paper, which described the bloodthirsty folklore surrounding the animal, was published in the TAPROBANICA: The Journal of Asian Biodiversity.
And with that, an animal that had largely gone unnoticed for millennia, went viral. News stories were printed. Videos were posted. Beatrix Potter probably turned in her grave.
Then in 2015, they were caught on camera for the very first time. They weren’t savaging herbivores, though.
Instead, they were foraging in the undergrowth of the Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan. Hardly the actions of a killer, but more revelations were to come.
In 2020, researchers discovered that the squirrels’ bizarre teeth – which feature long incisors with deeply carved ridges on the upper and lower jaw – are, in fact, used to crack very tough nuts.
The tufted ground squirrel is actually an extremely specialised and dedicated seed predator, that relies heavily on the nuts of the canarium tree.
It seems that we got the tufted ground squirrel all wrong. They really are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
So bushy-tailed in fact, that the furry appendage is 30 per cent bigger than their bodies, making it one of the most voluminous of all mammalian tails, relative to body size.
Why this is, no one really knows. It’s not for balance, because the squirrel spends most of its time on the forest floor looking for food. It’s not for insulation, because it rarely gets that cold in Borneo.
It could be to do with attracting a mate. It could have evolved to distract predators. Or it could be a form of cryptic camouflage – the tail has a grizzled charcoal colour with white frosting which may help the squirrel blend in with the forest floor.
Whatever the reason, it’s time we stopped slandering the tufted ground squirrel and instead learned to love it for the genuinely cute critter that it really, truly is.
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