There are hundreds of squirrels on USC campus, notorious among students for their big appetites and feisty personalities. If you look closely, you might notice collars on some of them. What’s up with that? Here’s Cari Spencer with the answer.
If you’re a USC student who has spent time lounging by the trees, chances are you’ve got a squirrel story.
FAULKNER: All of last semester, I would go to the tutor center. I would get my acai bowl and I would try to eat it behind Annenberg at the little stage place. And all these squirrels would just come bother me and be terrible and just keep getting increasingly closer.
That’s Indi Faulkner, a freshman jazz major. She’s had one of the most quintessential USC experiences. Being approached by gray, chunky squirrels who don’t seem to fear humans. At ALL.
FAULKNER: The more eye contact you make with them, I’m serious, the more eye contact you make, the more dangerous it becomes. Because they will come at you, like they won’t, but they will. And like one time, one of them, like, stood up at me and it was awful.
Dangerous or not, you can find squirrels chasing each other in the Music Complex, being fed peanuts outside of Taper Hall, or digging into a McDonald’s bag by the Old Annenberg stage. The squirrels you see are Eastern Fox squirrels. And they’re actually not native to California. Former Civil war soldiers brought them to the Veterans Hospital near UCLA to keep as pets. In 1904, they got loose. Now you can find them all over LA. Including at USC.
DEAN: Sorry, dude, I don’t have anything.
I’m sitting with USC biology professor Matt Dean on a bench between Taper Hall and the old Annenberg stage. We’re in squirrel territory. Just ten minutes into an interview about his squirrel-tracking mammalogy class, this bold, collared guy darts over. He sniffs and pokes around, probably hoping we have some Cheetos to toss his way.
DEAN: Do you see the wire hanging out? That’s, that’s the antenna. So he’s got it out. It’s normally wrapped up inside the tube.
Since 2019, Dr. Dean has been teaching BISC-363 with Professor Jim Dines. In the class, students help put wire collars on a dozen squirrels and track their radio signals. It’s a special opportunity for students to do real wildlife biology fieldwork, despite USC’s urban setting. The collaring usually happens during a break when there are less concerned student eyes around.
DEAN: We don’t really want to attract attention to ourselves when we’re trapping squirrels because some people will get upset about it. The squirrels are not harmed during the process, but they’re not happy.
The squirrels are lured into rectangular metal traps with peanuts, then into pillowcases to help gently pin them down.
DEAN: It’s basically in a full Nelson…But it can’t turn around and bite us. It can’t scratch us. The claws are really dangerous on a squirrel.
Students help slip a loose zip tie-like collar over the squirrels’ neck, then tighten it. But not too tight. The whole process is approved by USC’s Animal Care and Use Committee.
DEAN: We love the little buggers, right? We don’t want to hurt them. We just want to figure out where they’re going.
And that’s where the class’s teaching assistant Charlie Toney comes in.
TONEY: You hear that static? So I hear it kind of faint over this way. Now I’m pointing back south. A lot louder. Then point north. It’s a little bit quieter. Still some volume here. South again, pretty loud. All right. So we’ll walk south.
I’m following Charlie as he locates squirrel #020. In one hand Charlie’s got a metal antenna that’s about two feet long, and on his shoulder he’s lugging what looks like a brown lunchbox. Except inside is an electric box covered in numbers and knobs.
TONEY: So I’m pointing the, uh, the antenna north right now, and we hear a certain frequency or a certain volume. Really loud this way.
The fancy name for the process is radio telemetry. It’s kind of like a game of “Hot and Cold.” You know, that kids game where you tell someone if they’re close to something or not.
TONEY: It’s a lot of walking around in circles trying to hear where the beep is loudest. But basically we tune this to the frequency of the individual squirrel and which is also the squirrels ID number. And then we follow the trail of the increasing volume of beeps until we arrive at what we hypothesize are observed to be the squirrel’s location.
The beeping gets louder and louder, making it clear the squirrel is up in an oak tree behind Bovard. We see four different squirrel nests, but no squirrel.
TONEY: I’m going to guess that the squirrel is sleeping up here in one of these tree nests.
So squirrel #020′s GPS coordinates get logged as the oak tree.
There’s no groundbreaking squirrel research going on, there’s no top-secret experimentation done on the collared squirrels either. But there is a lot of practice for aspiring biologists. Charlie said taking the class as a sophomore is what put him on track to where he’s now. A first year graduate student in the molecular biology program, working in Dr. Dean’s lab. There’s much more consequential research happening in that lab, but as far as this undergrad class goes, Dr. Dean loves what he does.
DEAN: We’re just, we’re like science geeks and we like mammals and we like learning about them and we like learning about how to study them. And that’s what the class is about.
So maybe the next time you’re approached by squirrels when you’re just trying to eat your lunch, you’ll notice a collar. And hey, maybe you’ll actually see squirrel #020.
For Annenberg Media, I’m Cari Spencer.