Video of Squirrels ‘Street Fighting’ in Guy’s Backyard Goes Viral
If you live where there are a lot of squirrels, you know what a nuisance they can be. But Derrick Downey, Jr embraces his neighbors and in fact, even built them a really cool house in his backyard!
Derrick has been documenting the lives of his squirrel friends Maxine and Richard for the last couple of years. He's befriended both of them and can even hand feed them treats and food. In this video that he shared in January, his friend Richard "pulled up to his crib and saw hood rat Raymond" (another squirrel from the neighborhood) in his yard. Make sure your sound is on to hear Derrick's commentary because it's hilarious!
I must've watched @Derrick's video at least five times, and I laughed every time! His play-by-play of the kerfuffle and his reaction to it had me cracking up, as did his caption, "If standing on business was a squirrel". The video quickly went viral and has more than 11 million views, 1.3 million likes, and over 11 thousand comments...some of them just as funny as the video, like @TMackSC who got 74 thousand likes for the comment, ""How y'all gonna get mail" LOL!!!!" @Fawn McAfee got 50 thousand likes for her coment, "Hood Rat Raymond sent me!!!" I appreciated what @Tee Pierce Sr. pointed out, "Nobody caught on the Friday reference. When DayDay's roof was dented LOL! "Look at my roof"!"
Related: Man Sets up Most Elaborate House for the Wild Squirrels in His Neighborhood
Fun Squirrel Facts
We have more squirrels than I can count in our yards and neighborhood, and most of the time I'm just frustrated by them because they always steal food out of my birdfeeders. I'm not sure I'd want to make friends with them, but it would be cool to build them a house like Maxine and Richard's! Derrick's definitely gained their trust, and so have many other TikTokers who have made friends with squirrels.
I realized that I don't know much about squirrels, so I thought I'd look up some interesting facts. Like this one.... did you know that squirrels will pretend to hide food to fool any thieves who might be watching? They'll dig a hole, pretend to put nuts in it, and then feverishly cover up nothing. Then when thieves come by to steal the goods, they come up empty handed! This is a cool trick since they lose about 25% of what they bury to looters.
And on that note, did you know that they can find food that they've hidden away under up to a foot of snow? They dig a hole and follow the scent. This comes in handy during the winter months. Another interesting squirrel fact is that they can fall almost a hundred feet and land unharmed. They fluff out their tail like a parachute which slows their fall and usually allows them to grab on to something before they fall that far.
Who knew that squirrels were so cool? If I can ever find the patience, maybe I'll try to befriend the squirrels in my yard like Derrick has. It would be cool to feed them a snack directly from my hand!
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