Wow, this is really interesting. The “smarter every day” video guy, a former NASA jet propulsion engineer, tried to build a Ninja warrior course to prevent squirrels from getting to a cache of walnuts beneath a bird feeder, but they easily beat it. He totally underestimated his adversaries, they were much better jumpers than he anticipated, so they could jump through many of the challenging parts of his course.
20200527/https://gizmodo.com/former-nasa-engineer-builds-a-ninja-warrior-obstacle-co-1843636932
Yeah, it would definitely be more challenging if everything were further spaced apart, but then it would have to be stationed in a much larger and more open space than this person’s backyard, and I think squirrels don’t like large and open spaces. Probably precisely for that that reason, there’s not much they can climb on and jump off of. Squirrels are the polar opposite of geese, who conversely like large and open spaces and hate confined backyards.