Fig. 1. A diagrammatic representation of the experimental set-up, showing the instrumentation used to measure take-off and landing forces including the carpet-covered landing pole, the rope-covered take-off branch and the location of the strain gauge pairs on each. Also shown are the measurements used to analyse the results, relative to an approximate squirrel trajectory. (A) The controlled horizontal distance between the end of the take-off branch and the vertical landing pole, (B) the total distance covered in the glide calculated from the exact horizontal distance (C) and the drop (D).