Have You Seen This? Squirrels compete for nuts in backyard competition

Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.

THE BACKYARD — Squirrels will do almost anything for nuts, even work as actors and competitors for YouTuber and engineer Mark Rober.

Rober, a BYU graduate and former NASA scientist, began making videos of his backyard squirrels a few years ago after he got frustrated with their persistence in eating his bird seed — so he created an intense obstacle course which they had to complete in order to get any nuts.

In a video posted this week, however, Rober said he has realized the squirrels will always win in a competition against him for nuts — so instead he pitted the squirrels against each other in what he called "Backyard Squirrelympics."

Squirrels face off in challenges that all involve a delicious bite to eat — a long jump, a high jump, the nutcracker, a twisting balance beam and others — to figure out which team of two squirrels is the champion and earns a trophy full of nuts.

Each of the four competing squirrels has moments where they fall to the ground or launch themselves across the yard as they attempt to eat the nuts or carry them away for later.

This 23-minute video goes even further than the first two squirrel videos in narrating the lives of these squirrels. It includes social status drama, possible performance enhancing drug use and a new sinister rat character. There are squirrel sports announcers which may be the highlight of the competition.

The video is long, but it's definitely worth watching. It was posted on Sunday and already has about 8.5 million views. I wonder if these squirrel athletes have any idea how many people are watching their aerobatics ... and whether they've found an agent yet.