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Illustration by Ben Jones
Something was wrong with the squirrels of Appalachia. It was the fall of 1968, and they appeared to be making a sudden pilgrimage: attempting improbable swims across lakes, sprinting over highways and bursting into buildings. One squirrel, while fleeing, climbed into a critical piece of infrastructure and reportedly short-circuited power to much of Clarkesville, Georgia. “The squirrel,” the wire services reported, “was also extinguished.” The highways were lined with hundreds of dead squirrels. One scientist spotted 13 squirrels swimming due north across the reservoirs of North Carolina. Nothing could make them turn around. Assuming the squirrels must be starving, concerned citizens began sending boxes of acorns and hickory nuts to the afflicted areas, and grocery stores put up signs encouraging shoppers to feed the squirrels.
The problem was that the squirrels were, by and large, well-fed. There was no shortage of food. Yet by some estimates, 20 million squirrels were on the move. Wildlife officials were flummoxed. So they notified the Smithsonian Center for Short-Lived Phenomena.
The CSLP was a kind of clearinghouse for news of intriguing phenomena that scientists might want to study as they occurred—from volcanic eruptions to oil spills, meteorite strikes, sudden islands, unusual migrations and explosions in the populations of non-native species. Every day, an odd phenomenon occurred somewhere, offering a priceless natural experiment. But researchers worried they were missing most of them.
zoologist captures a squirrel in a cage
Vagn Flyger, the University of Maryland zoologist who cracked the 1968 mystery of the migrating squirrels, gathers his trap after snaring one of the little guys.
Cover image of the Smithsonian Magazine April/May 2025 issue
Cover image of the Smithsonian Magazine April/May 2025 issue
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This article is a selection from the April/May 2025 issue of Smithsonian magazine
“For years, scientists have been aware of the almost total lack of the essential research information on the very earliest beginnings of natural events,” Sidney Galler, then assistant secretary for science at the Smithsonian Institution, told Newsweek about how the idea for the CSLP had come about. “We come in the middle and have to go back and attempt to reconstruct what actually happened.”
But now the Smithsonian had built an unprecedented network to help scientists get fast, accurate information about developing situations. “We have our finger,” said Robert Citron, the director of the center, “on the pulse of planet Earth.”
In its seven years of existence, the CSLP logged oil spills and ashened snowfalls, chased still-warm meteorites, laid the foundation of an essential global database of volcanic activity, and heralded the (erroneous) discovery of at least one prehistoric sea monster. And it left, in the archives of the Smithsonian, a rather large paper trail. Decades later, those archives are a window into a moment of epistemological uncertainty at the dawn of the environmental age, when nothing quite seemed to make sense anymore and concerned researchers were starting to piece it all together, one strange event at a time.
Word of freak events like a mass squirrel migration arrived at the well-appointed CSLP offices in what was then the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The observatory had the kind of communications infrastructure that this new global scientific hotline required. At the center, at various points in its existence, a staff of nine hovered across four phone lines, teletypes, cable machines and a shortwave radio set, fielding as many as 30,000 letters and cables per month reporting short-lived phenomena. On the wall, it had a gigantic map of the world and a clock keeping military time. In the staff’s minds, they kept a working, if broad, definition of short-lived phenomena: “rare natural events that might otherwise go unobserved or uninvestigated.”
The CSLP relied on a network of scientists who sent in news of odd happenings. If something “strange, sudden and unexpected” occurred anywhere on the planet, word would spread until a correspondent caught wind and sent the news to the center. There, the staff would generate a list of other correspondents who studied the relevant field—volcanologists, presumably, for the sudden islands; geologists for the diamond-encrusted meteorite that ripped through a Finnish farm’s roof; ornithologists for the four million blackbirds suddenly roosting in Scotland Neck, North Carolina; entomologists for the ballooning spiders in St. Louis. “Depending upon the urgency of the situation,” Britain’s Daily Telegraph explained, correspondents “are informed by telephone, shortwave radio, cable, telegram or postcard (which is airmailed if they live outside the New England area).” Short-lived phenomena, it turned out, were often urgent. One center employee described the workplace atmosphere as sometimes amounting to “almost a panic situation.” In its first nine months, CSLP expanded its network to 384 correspondents in 71 countries. By 1970, it would grow to 2,400 scientists in 134 countries, plus many scientists in the U.S. government, from the Department of the Interior to NASA.
office with computers and bulletin boards
The offices of the Center for Short-Lived Phenomena outside Boston, 1974, the year before the center began winding down. The letter board on the left lists U.S., NATO and Soviet satellites. Digitial Commonwealth
The Smithsonian had a lot of experience with this sort of citizen science: In the 1840s, its volunteer network of weather observers became the precursor to the National Weather Service. But the CSLP was attempting to collate first drafts of scientific work at greater and more varied scale than the Smithsonian had ever done. Correspondents positively deluged the center. Some sent stray data—like bits of dirt and descriptions of strange mounds forming in Peru. Had the center seen anything like that? High school teachers and members of the Soviet Geophysical Committee alike wrote to express their gratitude for CSLP reports. Advertising account executives wrote to ask if the center could provide a reference for “an active volcano that would serve as a set for a TV commercial.”
But the center’s core work had to do with the sort of escalating environmental crises that would lead, only two years after its opening, to the first Earth Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. During those same years, the center was established in the popular imagination as a kind of index of just how out of control everything had gotten.
“New Smithsonian Center Investigates Natural Disasters as They Happen,” ran one Businessweek headline. “Smithsonian Keeps Tabs on Nature’s Violent Ways,” proclaimed the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel. CSLP even launched a Dial-A-Phenomenon phone line in 1969, which anyone could call to hear recorded descriptions of unfolding phenomena. “If you think you have problems,” a columnist wrote, “call dial-a-phenomenon. … Yesterday, for example, a cheerful-sounding young woman told callers that a huge comet was heading for Earth.”
The antics of the center were entering the public consciousness. Dick Cavett had Citron, the center’s director, on his popular talk show the same night as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and the novelist Renata Adler wrote about the center in her acclaimed, haunting 1976 novel, Speedboat.
In the end, though, the CSLP’s relative fame could not sustain it. The problem the center was trying to solve would be much more simply addressed by a technology that debuted just one year after its founding: Arpanet, the precursor to the internet. In short order, digital technology would make CSLP’s strenuous networking—the frantic phone calls and airmailed postcards—quaintly irrelevant and certainly too expensive.
Facing perennial budget challenges, Citron began trying to reposition the center’s work to contribute to the growing pool of networked, global data that would power the new, intensively legislative phase of the environmental movement. Citron wrote: “As a prototype of the monitoring systems that must surely follow, the center has shown that worldwide reporting networks, even when composed of loosely bound volunteers, can contribute to a significant overview of the planet.” He became involved in the United Nations Environment Program, where he was a driving force behind a plan to integrate many environmental tracking systems around the globe—the Global Environment Monitoring System. That system exists to this day.
But it can be difficult to see all the hard, very human work behind a global data set—for instance, the work of investigating a mass migration of gray squirrels.
As soon as CSLP got that report about squirrels on the move in 1968, the center called the scientists it knew might be interested in such a thing, including a University of Maryland zoologist named Vagn Flyger. Flyger headed to North Carolina almost immediately and set up a laboratory in a motel room in a town called Boone, where he examined squirrel specimens. Meanwhile, the center kept in daily contact with various scientists and wildlife officials in the afflicted region and sent updates to 71 interested correspondents around the world.
scientist feeding a squirrel
Flyger feeding a baby squirrel in 1968 in his laboratory at the University of Maryland, where he taught for more than two decades. To learn more about squirrel movements, Flyger fitted squirrels with tiny radio transmitters that allowed him to track the creatures. University of Maryland Libraries (2)
“Squirrel ‘migrations’ occur unannounced, and by the time a biologist arrives on the scene to investigate the situation, the event has usually ended,” Flyger wrote. But this time was different. Flyger was studying it as it happened. And in the end, he could offer an explanation. The squirrels weren’t fleeing because of fleas or “psychological factors,” as some had previously suspected, nor because of any immediate threat of starvation; they were fleeing because, in 1967, the trees had produced a strong crop of winter nuts, which led to more squirrels surviving the winter, and hence to a larger squirrel population the next fall. Those squirrels were amply fed on berries and the like through the warmer months of 1968, but that year’s crop of winter-ready foods was poor and would require stiffer competition with other squirrels. It was at this point, Flyger reasoned, that the squirrels recognized their dilemma and, with an eye toward the long winter, lit out in search of better rations to bury, confusing people all along the East Coast.
Flyger’s study made him one of the world’s leading experts on squirrels. Decades later, it also goes to show how even the oddest of short-lived phenomena tend to be hooked up to much bigger, slower, more complex dynamics. As Citron once said, “It is the short-lived events in nature that tell you most about natural systems.” You just have to know when to look.
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Ben Naddaff-Hafrey | READ MORE
Ben Naddaff-Hafrey is a writer in Brooklyn. Along with hosting Pushkin's "The Last Archive" podcast, he produces and appears on "Revisionist History."
Filed Under: History of the Smithsonian, Natural Disasters, Natural Sciences, Smithsonian, Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Wildlife