Internet Users Distracted By Huge Squirrel. (Of Course They Are.)

ANN ARBOR, MI — Squirrel!

You know that person in your workgroup who can’t maintain focus and whose attention is fixed instead on random distractions until someone shouts “Squirrel!” to snap the daydreamer back to the task at hand?

Well, this isn’t one of those stories. A squirrel on the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor is worthy of the attention it's getting on the internet, where the rotund rodent has become a legend.

It is unusually large — ginormous, actually. We blame the coronavirus pandemic for all the fascination surrounding this — what was it a Twitter user called it? — "roly-poly" squirrel. These days, it doesn't take much to amuse us.

If it weren’t for the bushy tail, which is about the size of a fir seedling, the supersized squirrel might pass as a groundhog.

“Sumo Squirrel,” as some on social media are calling the portly rodent hanging out on the U-M campus, is a fox squirrel, the largest species of tree squirrel in North America.

In social media posts sharing Corey Seeman’s snapshot of the enormous University of Michigan fox squirrel, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service said that adults typically weigh between 1 and 2 pounds, but allowed “this one might weigh a bit more than average.”

“Looks like the quarantine hit him hard,” someone pointed out, referencing the “quarantine 15.”

Some people were as nonjudgmental as we hope they would be when seeing our own waistlines supersized by the pandemic. Others were flat-out impressed by the rodent’s great girth.

“In awe of the size of this lad,” one man, whose last name is Fox, like the type of squirrel, wrote on Twitter. “Absolute unit.”

“People don’t realize how large these squirrels are,” someone else wrote. “There’s a reason old timers called them cat squirrels.”

“It’s a winter coat,” someone else posted.

Now, that’s funny.

But we've also seen people sink as low to the ground as, well, a squirrel burying nuts for the winter.

They're fat-shaming squirrels.

Lots of people added the hashtag #chonky, an internet iteration of “chunky” that was likely dreamed up by someone who is as annoying as the person easily distracted by squirrels and shiny objects.

You can hear it, can’t you, a nasal-toned: CHON-ky?

But no one addressed the pivotal question:

How does a squirrel that big jump from tree limb to tree limb?