In this video Tracey C., an artist from Mississauga, Ont., creates a squirrel crosswalk to see if she can get cars to slow down for our furry friends.
When we moved into our current house six years ago, the first animal to greet us was this squirrel.
We had only been in our new home a few minutes, and suddenly there she was, peeking in at us from one of the windows that looks out into the backyard.
This squirrel was really easy to identify because she had white spots all over her coat. Bold and instantly familiar she seemed to want something, so we started feeding her treats.
A few days later we realized she was also nesting in our soffits, right above the bedroom window, and if you listened closely you could hear several squirrels rustling in there: babies!
In fact one night there was a thunderstorm and after every thunderclap we could hear the babies whimpering in their nest.
Eventually the babies emerged – this is a few years back so I’m not sure how many there were – but there was at least two of them, one grey and a brindle one.
The babies would enjoy sunning themselves on the window sill below their nest during the day and eventually started to venture out into the yard.
Sometimes at nightfall their mother would join them back on the window sill, and she would nuzzle and play with them as the sun went down.
She was equally friendly with us. I found that if you fed her a treat “underhand” you could scruff her on top of the head a bit. If you were slow getting her her food, she would come right in the kitchen and look up at you expectantly.
The first summer we had her with us we ate at our patio table almost every evening.
She developed the habit of eating her treats right under the deck chairs where we were sitting. The others squirrels who were less tame wouldn’t come as close, so she didn’t get her treats stolen or chased around that way.
One time in the fall she showed up at the back porch entangled in an old piece of nylon badminton net or something. I fed her a pile of sunflower seeds to keep her busy and was able to snip it off her using a pair of scissors.
When the babies were old enough we sealed off the entrance to the nest she had made in the soffits, but not before building a cedar squirrelhouse, which I attached to a tree above the garage.
She moved her family into the squirrelhouse and we spent the summer feeding her and her kids every day, along with the other neighbourhood squirrels of course.
Eventually she dispersed the first litter and had another litter in that squirrelhouse. We watched them grow up as well.
Then another fall came and one day in October she didn’t show up at the back door looking for treats. One day became two and then three.
I checked the streets around our house expecting to find a body. Nothing.
So after about a week I made up this poster. Since she was so easy to identify I thought it might be worth a try.
I papered the neighbourhood with these for two blocks in each direction.
Not too surprisingly no one called. Most people probably thought it was a joke.
Some of the posters disappeared. Maybe the high school students wanted them for souvenirs.
About a month later my wife got a call from an unfamiliar number. The woman on the phone said, “I’m calling about the squirrel.”
By then we had forgotten all about the poster, so my wife didn’t clue in right away and said, “Huh? What squirrel?”
Apparently the caller lives about a kilometre south of us in a house backing onto a forested ravine. Her daughter noticed the poster and put it on their fridge and kept a lookout for the squirrel.
About a month later a squirrel fitting the description, brindle coat with white spots, started showing up at their bird feeder.
I went down to the ravine a few times looking for her but never spotted her myself.
It looks like I was more attached to Momma squirrel than she was to us.
The way I rationalize it to myself is that she needed to leave the squirrelhouse to her babies so she could build a nest elsewhere to raise another litter.
For a while I was able to keep track of her kids and sort of had a hazy idea of who her descendants were before completely losing track. None of them had white spots though.
For a year or two afterwards I could credibly tell myself that she was happily living in the woods south of our house somewhere. But squirrel lifespans in the wild being what they are, she is probably gone by now.
Who knows, despite having to move away to raise more litters, maybe she also thought of that summer we spent together as the good old days.
This video of a police office from Mesquite, Texas, pepper spraying a baby squirrel has been burning up the internets with over 347,000 hits so far.
Apparently the cute fuzzy animal had been following students at Kimbrough Middle School around, so the officer proceeded to “protect” the students by pepper spraying him.
You can watch the cute little thing writhe in agony in this video.
The squirrel was cared for at a rehabilitation facility, and later released into the wild—where it is no doubt dismembering innocent children even as I write!
The Mesquite Police Department later defended the officer, saying that the officer believed the animal had rabies.
I guess that means that next time I believe somebody is an alien impostor then it’s OK for me to shoot them through the head with a giant laser beam.
Well despite what he may have believed, the incidence of rabies in squirrels is extremely rare.
So even if this baby squirrel, which looks hardly big enough to even have teeth, bit any of the students there is zero chance that they would have contracted rabies.
Baby squirrels sometimes go through a friendly phase and may follow people around. I’ve even had them climb up my pant leg.
If they follow me around or are putting themselves in danger, I just grab them and place them on a nearby tree or some other safe place.
I guess it’s lucky for me that I wasn’t there at the time.
I’d probably be in a Texas jail cell now because there’s no way that I would have stood by and let this officer harm that squirrel.
Discovery channel may have Shark Week but the Washington Post has something even more awesome: Squirrel Week.
Yes people, a whole week of squirrel articles by one of their columnists John Kelly. (Of course the fact that they launched squirrel week beginning April 1st makes me a bit skeptical whether they really will have a whole weeks worth of squirrel coverage, but we can only hope.)
Apparently Kelly will be going on safari: "through the world’s squirrel stomping grounds: America’s Great Plains, Southeast Asia’s jungles, western Africa, and, of course, Washington, home to the black squirrel." and promises to "unravel the mysteries of a furry woodland critter that, in some people, elicits as much fear and revulsion as a fanged creature from the deep."
Be that as it may, people have been uploading some nice squirrel pictures over there, and the first article, which has interesting racial undertones, blames Canada as the source of D.C.'s black squirrels.
The Daily Mail published this article featuring pictures of a mother squirrel carrying one of it’s pups.
The charming photos were taken by Morkel Erasmus, 28 from Secunda, South Africa, while on holiday in the Kruger National Park.
While most people who go on safari are looking for elephants and leopards, Erasmus says: “I am a firm believer that you don’t need to see something ‘traditionally spectacular’ like a leopard or elephant in order to enjoy an excellent sighting in the wild.”
“Even the smallest creatures can provide hours of fun and excellent photographic opportunities.”
Here at nutsaboutsquirrels, we couldn’t agree more!
Baby squirrels have a reflex, such that when they are grasped by the belly, they will instinctively wrap themselves around whatever is holding them.
It’s similar to the reflex kittens have that makes them go limp when you grab them by the scruff of the neck.
This reflex allows them to hang on more tightly while their mother carries them, sometimes even jumping from branch to branch as she travels.
I have seen baby grey and red squirrels, behave the same way when carried.
