The bloke constructed two hamster wheels, one normal sized and one giant, and left them in a forest with hidden cameras recording them and their surroundings to see what would happen
I remember my pet Hamster, Hammy. When he wasn’t sipping water out of an oddly long metal straw, or just sitting in the corner looking frightened, he would while the time away zipping around a wheel in his cage, his determined eyes fixed on some imaginary horizon.
I think about Hammy’s wheel a lot. What life had I given this poor creature, that the highlight of his captivity was mindlessly looping around a circular prison?
It turns out I didn’t need to be so melodramatic. Animals just like doing that, and if you stick a wheel in whatever habitat they consider their front room, be it a cage or a canopy, most creatures are going to display at least a modicum of interest, if not start performing some loop de loops.
At least that’s according to research carried out by The Bird’s View, an instagram account that builds contraptions for animals to interact with in the wild.
In one experiment, the poster constructs two hamster wheels, one normal sized and one giant, and leaves them in a forest with hidden cameras recording them and their surroundings.
It’s pretty extraordinary footage. Creatures both great and small emerge out of the trees to engage with the two wheels, although most still aren’t the right size for these particular pair.
Two black bears can be seen sniffing around the wheel, and several deer and fawns give it a slight nudge, as if to say “what is a wheel doing in a forest?’.
Adorably, a tiny field mouse attempts to have a spin on the larger wheel, but is too small to get it moving, and so just sort of runs up and down the bottom of the ring.
The real stars of the videos are the squirrels, who successfully manage to go for a spin in the larger wheel, and also have a good time spinning the smaller one from the outside, which does looks like fun to be fair.
According to The Bird’s View, exercise can help wild animals destress, so it’s no surprise that the forest’s inhabitants are apparently very open-minded when a new piece of gym equipment seemingly shows up at their front door.
Justin Rhodes, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, described the phenomenon as “very weird”, but postured that “there’s something attractive about being able to get in a wheel and run unfettered”.
