When distressed, baby squirrels make high-pitched, chirping noises similar to birds. The pests make scratching noises and can be heard running around in attics and wall voids.
They also have a range of vocals, including squeaks and bark-like grunts. Squirrels are rodents, so they are constantly gnawing on objects, which makes repeated scraping or rubbing sounds. The chuck sound is short and varies in length. The whistles are loud, whereas the soft notes are comparatively quiet sounds. Fire-footed rope squirrels also have three kinds of alarm sounds.
Their chucks are noisier and span across more frequencies as compared to Thomas rope squirrels. They also use double chucks and staccato calls. These squirrels communicate through barks and coos. Their barks have varying frequencies and are short, broadband calls. Coos, on the other hand, are longer in length. They are narrowband calls with a descending frequency. The barks are used upon encountering a predator, or in response to loud noises.
Coos are used when responding to people. It is inaudible unless you are standing only a few meters away from the squirrel. It is elicited only in response to people. Bush squirrels communicate through clicks, trills, and alarm barks. Clicks are short and soft broadband calls that are said in repetition.
Trills are rapid, narrowband calls, whereas alarm barks are short and loud broadband calls. Clicks are also used in response to people and predators like snakes and mongooses. Barks are mainly used in response to predators as well. It also communicates through a loud, vocal bark and a loud whining sound.
The predator specificity associated with the chuff and bark sounds is unclear. The whining sound is said to be elicited by aerial predators and people. Formosan squirrels use distinct alarm calls for large birds, snakes, and feral cats. When encountering a feral cat, the squirrel will elicit a short, repetitive, broadband bark.
In case of a large flying bird, the alarm call is different from the cat one. In the case of snakes, however, the Formosan squirrel exhibits a very unique reaction.
The snake alarm call is a mobbing call. Besides predator-specific calls, squirrels also make noises in some specific social contexts. These include:. Male squirrels make a muk-muk call to show they are interested in mating with a female squirrel. This sound is an imitation of the sound made by a baby squirrel.
When a male squirrel communicates using this sound, it means that the female squirrel does not need to consider him a threat. Baby squirrels also send out hunger calls to their mothers. When they are three days old, these baby squirrels make noises that are similar to a squeak.
After three weeks, they can make growling noises to indicate hunger, and by the fourth week, they are able to communicate through short screams.
As bizarre as this behavior might seem, there is actually a logical survival reason why they do this. There are always good reasons and motivations for why squirrels make such extravagant noises and body language, and for the skilled naturalist or budding wildlife tracker , you can learn to understand what squirrels are telling you! There are many different species of squirrels, and while they all have similarities, there are also significant differences that affect their vocalization strategy.
The good news is squirrel species are usually quite easy to tell apart by their sounds and habitat. Most bioregions only have 1 or 2 different types of squirrels to choose from, which makes them much easier to identify than birds. Ground squirrels tend to live in open habitats like plains or meadows.
Tree squirrels on the other hand, spend a lot of their time up in the trees. They live in forests or mixed landscapes. This one basic difference already gives us a lot of really useful information about what it means when you hear a squirrel making noise. Living underground vs in the shelter of trees results in dramatically different levels of exposure to dramatically different types of predators. As a result, they tend to spend a lot less time being territorial, and a lot more time communally watching and communicating with each other about danger.
Pretty fascinating stuff! Tree squirrels have a lot more freedom than ground squirrels to make different types of noises in a wider variety of situations. Their excellent climbing abilities make it much easier to quickly deal with ground predators and they also have the added protection of being surrounded by a dense canopy of leaves.
As a result, tree squirrels are typically much more confusing with their calls and sounds than ground squirrels. It gets even more confusing when you throw in the fact that some tree squirrels are quite communal, living in peaceful treetop groups similar to their ground dwelling cousins.
The mixed specificity of these signals allows squirrels to adjust the specificity of their alarms and also their own risk of being detected by predators. Using both auditory and visual alarms together might reinforce the signal, making the alarms more noticeable. But who are these alarm signals meant for?
One possibility is that they function to let other nearby squirrels know a predator is lurking. However, it's also possible that the alarms are meant to let the predator itself know that the squirrel has spotted it.
Broadband sounds like kuks and quaas are easy to localize. These sounds, and conspicuous visual displays like tail flags, advertise the signaler's location. If an ambush predator like a cat knows its potential prey has spotted it, it might give up and look elsewhere for prey it can take by surprise.
One study showed leopards stalking monkeys in West Africa left the area more rapidly if the monkeys gave leopard-specific alarm calls. Domestic cats might also be deterred if they know they've been spotted by a squirrel. The narrow-frequency moans are more difficult to localize.
Given how specific the moans are to aerial threats, this might be a way for the squirrel to give an alarm call without advertising its location. Hawks can easily take squirrels off the ground or off the trunks and branches of trees, so advertising its location would not be good in the case of aerial predators.
Alerting the predator that the squirrel sees it may be the main function, but that doesn't preclude other squirrels from hearing or seeing the signal and also responding. McRae says he is coming to the conclusion that these alarm calls are used both by other squirrels and to let predators know they've been seen. McRae has shown that squirrels respond to other squirrels' alarm calls by becoming more vigilant and retreating up trees.
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