This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Seems like any time you see a squirrel, it's busy doing something.

It's headed somewhere, scrounging for food,

and being out and about all the time also means...

They're tasty morsels for a lot of different predators.

Keith Tarvin, a behavioral ecologist at Oberlin College.

He says squirrels scan their surroundings for hawks and owls, cats and foxes, but they also have another

surveillance system. They eavesdrop on nearby birds.

Eves dropping on alarm calls or eavesdropping on chatter is a cheap and easy way to supplement

the information that they have access to because it's free.

It's produced by other individuals in the environment.

It's publicly available to any organism that has the cognitive ability

to recognize and interpret that information.

Tarvin's colleague Marie Lilly tested that ability by riding around town on her bicycle

stopping when she found a squirrel.

Then she'd set up her equipment, play the fearsome scream of a red-tailed hawk, and then either play the casual, unw worried chatter of

songbirds, or ambient noise as a control.

All the while she observed the squirrel's behavior.

And she noticed that when squirrels heard the reassuring chatter of songbirds following the hawk's scream,

they relaxed more readily.

Imagine this, if you're walking in a crowd and everyone seems pretty happy and content and they're chit-chatting with each other, you might even subconsciously take that as information that all of those eyes and ears

...