There’s a funny yet fascinating saying about squirrels: “No matter how high a squirrel falls from, it will survive. There was even one squirrel that fell from 5,000 miles… but it didn’t make it because it died of hunger.”
Behind the joke lies an intriguing truth. Squirrels rarely suffer serious injuries from falling, thanks to their unique body structure. Their fluffy fur and bushy tail help with balance, and when they spread their limbs wide, they create drag that remarkably slows their descent.
Instead of plummeting at dangerously high speeds, squirrels fall much more gently compared to other animals of similar weight. Aerospace engineers, after calculating a squirrel’s weight and body size, found that the effects of gravity and air resistance limit its terminal velocity to about 10 meters per second—roughly 37 kilometers per hour.
For comparison, a skydiver in freefall, belly down, reaches around 54 meters per second—five times faster than a squirrel. This means that a squirrel reaches its maximum speed within the first three seconds of falling, and whether it drops from a tall pine tree or from the stratosphere, it will hit the ground at roughly the same speed.
In fact, as long as a squirrel controls its posture during the fall, it will almost always survive. For instance, when it deliberately leaps from a tall tree to escape predators, the squirrel “knows” it will land safely. The only real danger comes if it accidentally crashes into something hard on the way down—then survival isn’t guaranteed.
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