Squirrel is definitely the candidate. Their bulging, expressionless eyes and twitching noses may not look like geniuses at first glance, but some squirrel species show quite extraordinary cognitive abilities.
Squirrels are mainly cereal-eating animals - they feed mainly on nuts and seeds. They live in temperate areas, which have experienced drastic seasonal changes. To survive the annual winter famine here, they adopted a strategy that many animals use: storage.
In autumn, the leaves turned red, and the squirrels began to prepare for the winter and collected a large amount of nuts. But how to prevent squirrels and other creatures from stealing all the nuts?
A few species have built a storage room, a unique enclosed location where they leave all the harvest, but the vast majority prefer a strategy called decentralized hoarding. They buried each nut (they may collect thousands in total) in a different place so that if the opponent finds one, it won't find the entire hiding place there either. However, it’s not just a purposeless process: no, the squirrels are very methodical, organizing the forest floors of their territory into different areas to grow different types of nuts.
When the depth of winter arrives, rodents use their hiding place as their primary food source. Incredibly, they correctly remember the exact location of 95% of buried nuts! While smell will certainly work, it is not that simple. Research shows that eastern grey squirrels know where to find and prioritize targeting their own buried nuts that smell the same as those hidden by other local squirrels. This requires incredible memory, which can overshadow anyone.
This hoarding behavior has another layer that betrays more wisdom: deception. Gray Squirrel often deliberately creates "bait"; they dig out and refille the soil without having to place nuts. Competitor Squirrels, who attempted to steal a companion pantry, saw these disturbed areas of the earth, searching for food, but found nothing. This greatly reduces the possibility of theft.
Storage behavior is just one aspect of the squirrel's lifestyle and seems to indicate that they have a certain degree of intelligence. More importantly, they have been proven to be masters of problem solving many times in the lab and have a complex series of behaviors used for communication.
