Over the years, eastern grey squirrels in my backyard have outsmarted me so many times by jumping, hanging upside down and even tight rope walking over to my bird feeders that I’ve finally surrendered.

I no longer try to foil them. Now, I accept these squirrels for what they are: amazing, acrobatic little animals that play an important ecological role. This observation turned my head on these critters:

“The storage behavior (caching behavior) of the seeds by the squirrel is very important for the renewal of many tree species, in particular for plants that produce heavy seeds that have little chance of germinating when they fall close to the mother plant,” writes an Italian website, called rossoscoiattolo.eu, which is dedicated to red squirrels, a close relative of grey squirrels.

“Much of the renewal of chestnut trees in mixed forests, for example, depends on squirrels,” they add. And I suspect oak and hickory trees are aided by squirrels, as well.

Squirrels, as we know, are part of the rodent family, an immense group encompassing ground squirrels, tree squirrels, flying squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, marmots and prairie dogs, to name a few.

Their scientific family name, Sciuridae, is derived from two Greek words: “skia” and “oura,” meaning shadow and tail, respectively. And if you put the two words together, they describe a squirrel perfectly, “One who sits in the shadow of its tail.”

Surprisingly, there are over 200 different species of squirrels in the world, and they’re found on every continent except Australia and Antarctica.

The African pygmy squirrel is the smallest, measuring five inches long, and the three-foot-long Indian giant squirrel is the largest. Our grey squirrel fits somewhere in the middle, weighing about 1.3 pounds and measuring 21 inches from nose to tail.

In all my years of watching these animals travel from tree to tree, I have seen only one grey squirrel take a daring leap and miss, falling about 25 feet to the ground unharmed. Landing cat-like on its feet, the squirrel quickly recovered and scrambled up another tree.

On the ground, grey squirrels are vulnerable. But in a tree, few predators can touch these lightning-quick animals.

One afternoon, I watched a red-tailed hawk fail miserably at trying to pick off a grey squirrel in a tree. Every time the big bird swooped in, with talons outstretched, the squirrel slipped around the other side of the tree trunk. This deadly game went on for another five minutes, then the hawk gave up and flew off.

Unquestionably, grey squirrels can damage fruit crops, eat flower bulbs and slip into roof voids and do untold damage to a house. But they also help regenerate new tree growth in many forests.

Bill Hobbs lives in Stonington. He can be reached at whobbs246@gmail.com.