The Story
The chocolate shake is in the trash can, and so is the eastern gray squirrel. He has his forepaws around a lidded Shake Shack cup and his mouth at the rim, and the people filming from above are losing their composure.
The shake came from the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park, New York. The shot looks down into a clear liner, onto crumpled brown paper, a wad of foil and a second, clear cup behind the first. A voice announces that he has the whole shake. Then the call goes up for a low angle.
The best moment in the clip belongs to the straw. He draws it out of the cup, tosses it aside and gets down to drinking. Plastic is familiar ground for this animal. Gray squirrels gnaw constantly on bark, wood, plastic or metal, because their incisors grow throughout life.
Even in a garbage bag the field marks are clean. The back is grizzled, with the cinnamon tones some gray squirrels carry, and the large fluffy tail curls up behind him. Its white fringe and his white front rule out the larger eastern fox squirrel, whose tail fringe and belly run reddish yellow.
Nothing in the usual diet looks like this. Gray squirrels live mostly on acorns and on hickory, walnut and beech nuts, along with seeds, buds, flowers, fruit and fungi. They are comfortable in suburbs and cities, and bird feeders already give them a bonanza of food; a squirrel can jump six feet straight up to reach one. A trash can with a shake in it asks a good deal less.
The habit with a good find is to bury it, scatter-hoarding food in many separate caches and locating them again by memory and smell. A milkshake offers no such option. New York already had Pizza Rat, and this animal goes down as Milkshake Squirrel. A voice warns him that he is going to get a tummy ache. He pays it no attention.
