Squirrels are rodents, just like rats

but with better public relations: put a bushy tail on a rat, and you've got a handsome squirrel, and now Beatrix Potter can tell you a charming story (Squirrel Nutkin), and it doesn't have to be nasty (Samuel Whiskers the rat — jesuschrist, he was going to bake Tom Kitten into a pastry!).

Everybody knows rats are clever, but regarded as too guileful, mischievous, filthy, and a public menace (which they are, indeed). Squirrels, on the other hand, are friendly and cheeky, if perhaps sometimes annoyingly assertive. But to see them scampering along, tail fluttering like Isadora's scarf, is a universal delight.
And oh, how comical those squirrels are, always burying nuts, and forgetting where — you dope! — and up comes a tree, and squirrel goes hungry.

Squirrels are pretty sharp critters, too, though — as you can expect, relating them to their crafty, nasty cousins, the rats.

It takes a long time to make a squirrel

the gestation is nearly as long as a cat, and although kittens open their eyes after three or so weeks, squirrels generally don't until five weeks. They're weaned about the same time, six to ten weeks, but although cats are sexually mature and randy at six months, squirrels aren't for a year. A nice illustration of neoteny, or prolonged juvenility during brain development (humans being the best example).

There are a few hundred species of squirrel on the planet (you can read about them at Wikipedia yourself; I'm covering the political beat), with a wide variety of food caching strategies. Some squirrels create a huge cache of whatever resource is abundant (often a seed, such as conifer cones or tree nuts, such as acorns, walnuts, beech seeds…), and you can bet they don't forget where it is.

Commonly, though, squirrels bury their cache all over, as individual nuts. Just now, as I'm writing this, the walnuts and filberts are coming up in my little town, planted by jays and squirrels. It's a nutty town.
They have no intention of remembering where the nut is, and don't need to, having super-acute senses of smell; squirrels are able to smell buried nuts through several inches of snow, even. If they need the nut, they'll find it.

This strategy enables some valleys to maintain native, deciduous hardwood forests on the slopes, as without the squirrels planting nuts uphill, they'd begin to congregate at the bottom. Oaks in valleys of California are a good example.

Known as "scatter-hoarding," the squirrels are like trekkers preparing, laying caches along the future route.
Or, more as one fellow I was talking with immediately grasped while I explained this:

"They're socialists!"

That's it exactly.

Those squirrels are busy burying nuts for the future, needy squirrel, not bothering to be mindful of which squirrel it happens to be. Might be them, might be another. And when some seeds come up, they eventually contribute to the food supply — although it might be tempting to project husbandry on to the squirrels, as they're engaged in agriculture, however incidental, there's really no need for them to be self-conscious of their actions and motives, as the tactics suit the overall strategy of making sure that squirrel and resource arrive together at the distant future, a single, well-managed package. And thank goodness for the squirrels — if self-conscious of their altruistic nature, they'd no doubt form committees, and down the slippery slope they'd go, like misbegotten acorns.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the Primates are the most highly evolved, but I'm with the Sciuridae, the "shadow tails." They are stewards, unselfconsciously, freely contributing to the forward advance of squirrels and their kind, practicing perfect socialism, and setting a fine example.

Excelsior, squirrels!