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Sniff. Sniff. From a squirrel&rsquo;s vantage point, the peanut butter in that wire contraption smelled so good, so enticing &#8230; it was just too hard to resist.
				The furry little animal entered the humane trap, one of several set up in Wilkes-Barre&rsquo;s Kirby Park on a recent afternoon, and was caught.
				Within the next 10 minutes or so, Wilkes University students would release it. But first they would remove it from the trap, tag it, and give it a personality test.
				A personality test? For a squirrel?
				&ldquo;You have bold individuals and more shy individuals,&rdquo; said Wilkes University biology professor Michael A. Steele, who has been researching oak trees and the animals that eat their acorns for three decades. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s as much variation within species as between species.&rdquo;
				Steele, whose eighth book, &ldquo;Oak Seed Dispersal: A Study in Plant-Animal Interactions&rdquo; was published earlier this month by Johns Hopkins University Press, expects his research at Kirby Park will show that a bold squirrel is more likely than a shy squirrel to carry an acorn further from its parent tree.
				The bold squirrel even might be more willing to risk being out in the open, where a hawk could swoop down on it, in order to cache, or bury, a preferred, high-nutrient acorn.
				That&rsquo;s not only good for the squirrel, who is intent on finding the best hiding places to store its food; it&rsquo;s good for the trees and the overall health of a forest.
				&ldquo;For decades we&rsquo;ve known that seeds need to be far away from the parent tree,&rdquo; Steele said. &ldquo;If they are too close to the parent, the competition for light and nutrients, and the risk of disease is higher because of the crowding effect.&rdquo;
				Noting that research from other universities has indicated &ldquo;for 18 hardwood species &#8230; the seeds most preferred and most likely to be carried out in the open are the seeds whose seedlings have the lowest shade tolerance,&rdquo; Steele said, &ldquo;it almost seems as if the trees are driving the whole process.&rdquo;
				Over the years Steele&rsquo;s research has taken him to Mexico, Central America, Europe and China. He&rsquo;s currently collaborating with a scientist in Poland, whose parallel research involves seed dispersal and yellowneck mice, while Steele&rsquo;s research involves how squirrels&rsquo; boldness or shyness affects seed dispersal here in North America.
				So, how do you test a squirrel&rsquo;s personality?
				&ldquo;To test their boldness we record a number of behaviors as we approach the trap,&rdquo; Steele said, adding that after his students remove the animal from the trap they put each squirrel individually into a bag to calm it down. Then it gets a metal tag in its ear and a number painted on its side with cattle dye, to identify it in the future.
				&ldquo;Then we put them in a chamber with four little walls. That requires them to either sit in one part of the chamber or jump over the walls. We videotape how they behave for three minutes and then we release the animal. We measure things all along the way.&rdquo;
				While a reporter talked to Steele and his research assistants at Kirby Park, one gray squirrel repeatedly &mdash; and boldly? &mdash; flung itself into all four compartments of the clear plastic chamber before it found the open door and scampered away, first to one tree, then to a second tree, finally to a third.
				&ldquo;They don&rsquo;t like the sycamores,&rdquo; Steele said, explaining why the squirrel abandoned the first two trees and climbed the third, which was an oak.
				&ldquo;One thing my lab has shown, we have established that the animals have priorities of their own,&rdquo; Steele said, offering the example that red oak seeds hold more nutrition than white oak seeds, and squirrels will take greater risks to protect the more valuable acorn.
				Squirrels also have been known to engage in behavioral deception, he said, explaining the animal might dig a hole but not really bury an acorn there, thereby deceiving another animal that might want to steal it. That kind of tactic once had been thought to only occur in primates, Steele added.
				As a trio of research assistants tagged more animals, Steele said Kirby Park is an ideal place to research squirrels because they are easy to find &mdash; &ldquo;70 to 80 live in this part of the park,&rdquo; he said &mdash; and also because they face risks from hawks and other predators just as they would in a wilder area.
				&ldquo;Most of their natural behavior is intact,&rdquo; he said.
				The professor&rsquo;s latest book, which follows seven other books and some 120 papers he has written, includes chapters on the life cycles of red oaks and white oaks, the differences between &ldquo;high mast&rdquo; years, when trees produce a lot of seeds and fruit, versus &ldquo;low mast&rdquo; years and how insects including weevils play into the mix.
				&ldquo;The book is a tool intended for students in forest ecology but it&rsquo;s also for anyone interested in seeing how a whole system works,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;To me, that&rsquo;s one of the exciting things, to put it all together. I think it&rsquo;s really important to get the science out to the general public as well.&rdquo;
				In 2016 Steele received an OPUS Award from the National Science Foundation&rsquo;s Division of Environmental Biology, to write the book. He is the first faculty member at a small liberal arts university to receive the prestigious honor and grant which, since its institution in 2013, has traditionally been given to researchers at larger, research-focused institutions.

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Wilkes University prof authors book on squirrel research