I'm Sasha newer I'm a PhD student in the environmental and Life Sciences program at Trenton University I study mammals and their behavior but my bread and butter is flying squirrel vocalization so I'm interested in how they're using their vocalizations in which contexts and who they're communicating with when they use them flying squirrels are really interesting because they're super elusive so most people can go their entire lives without ever seeing them even though they live in our own backya
rds the reason for this is because they're nocturnal so they only come out at night which makes them really hard for most people to see and on top of it they don't really like people flying squirrels also have some really interesting characteristics that make them really unique among different types of squirrels so first of all they Glide so they don't actually fly like a lot of people assume but they can glide really far they communicate with ultrasonic vocalization so that means we can't hear
base basically any of the calls that they're making but I can use specialized recording equipment to listen to those really high frequency vocalizations in the past couple of years a researcher discovered that Flying Squirrels fluoresce bright pink under UV light which most people wouldn't have guessed and it took us a long time to figure this out and this is something that we're still really trying to figure out the function of but it's fascinating to see them fluoresce such a bright color when
you shine this light on them and then finally flying squirrels eat truffles so they actually dig them up and eat them and then spread them across the forest floor in Northern habitats flying squirrels are really key in the health of an ecosystem and making sure that there's enough fungi around for trees to be healthy which in turn flying squirrels use and glide from Recently I was involved in a project with National Geographic and Disney plus looking at the really interesting traits that flying
squirrels have in a special that they're doing called Supernatural and so for this process we had a team come to us and we trapped flying squirrels and then released them into controlled filming environments and threaded together you got a really interesting story of flying squirrels nesting together emerging from their nests gliding around finding Truffles and then returning to their home for the night and so I was lucky enough to be the squirrel Wrangler on this project where I was required t
o do the trapping and handling for this project and then trying to retrieve flying squirrels from these controlled Arenas that we had them in aquariums at one point we have a log that we put them into with a few different Flying Squirrels to get that nesting Behavior so it was just fascinating to be a part of it and see how they record what we think is a flying squirrel just naturally running around in the woods is actually over 30 Scrolls threaded together into this one shot that you've got at
the end some of the unique challenges of filming Flying Squirrels is first and foremost they only come out at night so our days start at 2 p.m and go till 2 or 3 A.M in the morning and on top of that for some reason these Crews love to come during winter so we get to hike around in the woods with our snowshoes on we're trying to protect the squirrels from the snow and keep them warm and on top of that flying squirrels don't come out for nearly as long during the winter months this is because the
y get really cold and they need each other to stay warm and so we're really reducing the hours in which we can trap these Flying Squirrels we filmed for up to two weeks at a time every single day going out for up to 12 hours so it's a really intense period of time but it's worth it for the shots that we get but when you see those Final Shots you know it'll be probably less than five minutes of footage it's over two weeks of work and like I said up to 30 Scrolls per shot that you're seeing so whe
ther it's them gliding or landing on a tree every time we're resetting the camera and every time we're releasing up to that many Scrolls to get those shots yes it's really crazy yeah I'm really lucky that I work with them in a context that I can interact with them safely and I can interact with a lot of them over a short period of time getting to work with so many film Crews during my PhD has really been not only an honor but a really cool experiment for me inside communication and a way to expl
ore what that can look like and how you can take an animal that's as hard to film as a flying squirrel and turn it into something that now thousands if not millions of people can enjoy and on top of that being a behavioral ecologist someone who wants to look at what an animal is doing more or less in a natural environment learning the ways that we can record these animals in a way that we can digest that information is just fascinating yeah and useful for me Supernatural airs on Disney plus Sept
ember 21st don't miss it
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