TV review: The Super Squirrels explores the incredible intelligence of these creatures we know and love

Ever since an editor once told me that I could stick my ideas where the squirrel sticks his nuts, I’ve wondered where exactly that might be.

Now I know that I should have responded: “That rather depends on which subspecies of squirrel you mean.” Though I think I was doing his nut in enough already. So maybe just as well.

I know this because I watched The Super Squirrels, a highly watchable programme in the best traditions of BBC natural history – erudition balanced by extreme cuteness, and a touch of patriotic, sentimental pride in the brave struggle of orphan baby red squirrel Billy to make his way back to his Scottish forest home (he made it, you’ll be glad to learn).

Super Squirrels featured the work of a surprising number of squirrel academics (by which I mean humans who study squirrels, rather than especially brainy members of the squirrel community who’ve got PhDs and have set up their own squirrelly college). Through them we’re finding out not just where the creatures stick their nuts, but how, why and when.

Take the fox squirrel, which is native to North America, and provides ready study material for the squirrelologists at Berkeley College, no less. There’s a woman there who spends her time drilling tiny holes in hazelnuts, into which micro tracking devices are inserted. The nuts are then painted bright yellow, to aid identification, numbered, and left out for the fox squirrels. The fox squirrel, as is its habit, as a “scatter hoarder”, then buries each nut individually around the college grounds, seemingly at random. This they do rather than stashing them all in one spot the better to protect their nuts from theft. The fox squirrel (the odd name was left unexplained, by the way), is a more solitary creature than other varieties, which may explain why it has to take such extreme measures. It’s also one of the bigger squirrel species, so it does need its nuts, high in concentrated calorific value.

Anyway the experiment showed that these squirrels have the capacity to recall most – 90 per cent – of the individual locations of their nuts when they come to retrieve them. Given that they bury about 10,000 nuts in such a fashion over a season, that means that they can remember 9,000 different nut hidey holes. And some of us humans can’t remember where we left the car!

Most intriguing of all, these fox squirrels’ brains actually get bigger as they go about burying and memorising their nut supply matrix in the autumn, returning to normal size by the spring. Indeed, there was a suggestion that one of the reasons why the grey squirrel, the least welcome visitor from America until Donald Trump, outperforms the British red squirrel is because it has a bigger brain inside its nut (nut meaning skull, in case that pun wasn’t laboured enough for you).

Other squirrels and chipmunks (another super cute example of this successful and underestimated family of creatures) have a more conventional approach, marshalling their nuts into as secure a hole as they can find. But there are also squirrels that don’t eat nuts at all, such as the prairie dog, which makes do with grass, but shares the same gift for survival and enterprise.

Squirrels can teach us much. Maybe when we understand how the Arctic squirrel survives during its hibernation – its body temperature falls below freezing – that could even lead to some medical breakthrough. Already the mechanics of the squirrel leap – equivalent to a human jumping the length of two buses – are helping inform robotics. How wonderful it would be, too, if we could discover even more about aeronautics from the subspecies of “flying” (more accurately, gliding) squirrels with their magnificent patagiums and uropatagiums – you see, even reading about squirrels expands your vocabulary.

My interest in the squirrel lifestyle, being a bit of a hoarder and saver myself, became intense during the programme. I felt a little as though I was communing with them in all their multifarious glory through the medium of BBC2. I was especially impressed by the champion super squirrel that had shown the most impressive combination of intellectual and physical skills as he (or she – I think we should be told) conquered a fiendish obstacle course that culminated in a Perspex and wooden vertical maze. Success demanded balance, grip, strength, cunning, intelligence, memory, sheer courage and other qualities that we humans like to think are ours and ours alone. It was strongly reminiscent of the old ITV show The Krypton Factor, but with less budget for the prizes (hazelnuts, of course) and skipping the general knowledge round.

The thing scarcely needed any more charm, but it got another dollop anyway, from the narrator, Olivia Colman. Talking to us as though we were bright nursery school children (which is the correct tone in these assignments), her timbre is now instantly recognisable as a voiceover in the way that Richard Briers and Andrew Sachs once were, and David Tennant still is. It’s a soft, friendly, comforting sort of tone, but without being at all sickly or patronising. An audience knowing who is doing the narration without checking the credits, as in the case of Colman, is a sure sign that you have squirrelled your way into the nation’s affections. So just like the squirrels, red, especially but, even if grudgingly, those grey interlopers as well.