Nothing like a game of peek-a-boo for your life.
It’s a bobcat-eat-squirrel world out there, and that was on full display in this video out of Salt Lake Cit, Utah. A couple of big cats had a bushy-tailed rodent trapped up a tree, but securing the squirrel for dinner was easier said than done. The little thing showed off some incredible speed and elusiveness, and from what we can tell… it was able to outsmart not one, but two bobcats.
This “cartoon-like” chase down happened around a big ol’ tree in Utah. If you put in old timey, silent movie music to this video, it almost perfectly matches the antics of the bobcats shimmying around the tree to try and get this squirrel. If Las Vegas were to put odds on this matchup, the felines would have been heavily favored. But the underdog (under-squirrel?) pulled off the upset.
The young bobcats met its match with this smart squirrel, who was able to match every move of the two predators. When the bobcats went right, the squirrel went right. When one of the bobcats went down and to the left, the squirrel simply mirrored it. Something tells me this rodent had been in a situation like this a time or two.
The squirrel was pulling off an absolute Houdini-level strategy, doing everything in its power to keep the tree in between itself and the big cats. When you watch the video, you might even let out a laugh as the squirrel continues to make all the right moves, and it was all captured on camera by a Utah resident for the rest of our enjoyment.
Props to the camera person for staying still and capturing the entirety of the tense hunt. Both bobcats were using every once of their brain power to figure out the intelligent squirrel’s next move, but the little rodent was smarter. I think we were all rooting for the squirrel to pull off the great escape, and by all accounts, it appears as though it did.
The squirrel had no problem holding it’s own bodyweight on the tree, and did its best to stay high up on the trunk. As for the bobcats, they were undoubtedly hungry and wouldn’t have minded to chow down on some fresh squirrel… but they just ran out of steam. It was much more difficult for them to stay up in the tree, and the bobcats eventually tuckered out and gave up on the pursuit.
It was a masterclass in elusiveness, and the Salt Lake City squirrel appears to have lived to see another day. The video was posted by KSL News with this caption:
“A Salt Lake City resident captured this video of two bobcats hunting a squirrel right outside their home just outside downtown over the weekend. Or maybe they just wanted to play?”
If by “play” you mean “play with their food,” then yes… that’s what the bobcats were doing. There’s no way the big cats were just chasing around the squirrel for fun. They were in hot pursuit to have the squirrel for a meal. I guess they heard the rodent tastes a lot like chicken?
