Maple trees, gray and fox squirrels discovered, have a natural system of providing solar protection and geothermal cooling on sunny, summer July days.

The tree’s simple, oppositely arranged leaves are excellent at blocking much of the radiant energy that could make a squirrel’s hairs stand on end. Crawl underneath the tree’s canopy and the air temperature drops 20 degrees some sunny days.

Shade is so great from maples that few plants can grow beneath a tree and those who can do it best by being spring ephemerals, which grow and bloom before maples leaf out.

Then, too, squirrels sprawl out on a smooth, thin-barked maple tree limb, a process called splooting, and give up body heat to the bark made cooler by the water moving inside the limb going from root to leaf to atmosphere.

Trees absorb soil water, which is way cooler than surface air, and conduct it from below the soil to every leaf on a tree where most of this water leaves by transpiration through leaf pores. Without the cooling of water being pulled up the tree by the loss of water at the top, the tree would be “cooked.”

Most of the water is not used by the tree, but rather it’s the tree’s geothermal air conditioning system. Materials are, of course, moved up and down the tree’s two conducting systems.

Animals, including squirrels, have a need during warm weather to cope, too. Splooting on limbs seems to be one of the ways squirrels cope. They combine this with cutting solar radiation by simply hanging out, more splooting, under those large leaves.

The word sploot, it has been reported, seems to have been modified a bit from splat, as flinging a ladle of thick batter on a cookie sheet.

Dogs sploot over air conditioner vents or under the shade of an elm tree, although elm trees are difficult to come by these days.

The word is not quite the onomatopoeia that splat is, but enough to get the idea. Chirp and oink are better examples of onomatopoeia, words that sound similar to the action.

Squirrels do not sploot on maple limbs during winter because there isn’t much water moving up the tree and therefore there would be no winter warming from splooting on a limb. On the other hand, our mechanical geothermal systems work summer and winter because fluids are forced through underground tubing.

These same squirrels do hang out in maples during winter, sometimes holding on upside down from a limb to lick leaking maple sap, or licking a sapcicle of frozen maple sap.

— Jerry Davis is an Argyle native and a freelance writer who lives in Barneveld. He can be reached at sivadjam@mhtc.net or at 608-924-1112.