It is well known that squirrels bury their food, nuts and seeds and other tasty tidbits. It is also well known that squirrels are cunning little thieves, stealing these little stashes of delicacies from other squirrels.

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What is a squirrel to do? Monitoring and watching all their caches (hiding places) of food continuously is impossible. 

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They get tricky and deceptive! They employ a strategy to fool their potential thieving neighbors. Years ago Michael Steel, a professor of biology at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, and his undergraduate assistants observed that squirrels would hold their food in their mouths, vigorously dig a hole in the ground, cover the hole ... but they were not actually depositing and burying the food. It was pure deception. They would sometimes do this several times in different locations before they would actually bury the nut.

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Steele and his colleagues called this "deceptive caching." Other squirrels watching them would be fooled into thinking there was a tasty morsel to be dug up and stolen to have for their very own.

A huge disappointment no doubt for them,

an empty cache.

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Credit needs to be given to these little furry rodents. Through their cleverness and ingenuity they have figured out how to protect their stashes of food and cut down on the pilfering of what they worked hard to find for future meals. It is really not surprising, considering their smarts when it comes to stealing from almost any bird feeder!