This squirrel may look like it's sick, but don't worry – it's just spreading itself thin to try and stay calm.
Have you ever come home on a hot day and just laid down on the cold kitchen floor? Does it sometimes happen that someone comes into the room and expresses concern about your health? Welcome to a squirrel's life.
Squirrels get hot like the rest of us. And when this happens, they lie face down, with their front paws stretched out in front and their back paws kicked back. This is called “splooting,” a name coined by pet enthusiasts on the Internet to describe the same position seen in dogs and cats. The Collins English Dictionary contains a brief definition for “sploot,” suggesting it is “perhaps changed from splat.” Scientists call this “heat dumping,” and while it makes a lot of sense on a hot day to expose most of your body's surface to air and a cool surface, when wildlife does this, everyone freaks out.
The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation received so many concerned calls about escaping squirrels in the summer of 2022 that they felt called to tweet a photo of a prostrate squirrel with this message:
Splooting can be observed in many warm-blooded animals when temperatures rise. The only real need is for the surface the animal is sprawling on to be cooler than the surrounding air – otherwise they would simply cook themselves. A quick Google search on “splooting” results in photos of grizzly bears roaming rocky beaches, rabbits, squirrels and even young birds stretching out on their bellies to cool off. The reason for the face-down position is that most mammals and birds have less fur and feathers on their undersides than on their backs, which allows the cool surface to make more contact with the skin.
Now this is interesting
Although juvenile birds have been seen in full flight, adult birds do not lie face down because it is dangerous – they crouch very close to a cold surface with their wings outstretched to allow airflow.
