Outdoor Hour Challenge: Squirrels

It was October when we first moved into our house about ten years ago, and one of the first things we loved about it was the big window over the dining room table, where we would sit and watch the squirrels trapeze through the trees bordering our back yard. We have lots of American walnut trees, and they are like a tractor beam drawing in these little acrobats.

There are quite a few squirrel’s nests in the brush out back, two of which are visible from the table as we eat or do schoolwork. We watch them year-round, and it seemed like a good time to gather together all of the observations we’ve accumulated since the spring, when we saw this gray squirrel eating buds while working out.

One evening in May, we noticed a female squirrel running from her nest up the tree, tearing off leaves, and returning to line her nest with them. My video work was pretty shaky (you can see it here), and the light at dusk wasn’t good, but it was still an amazing process to watch. She’s so very nimble, and I couldn’t help but wonder how she decided when the job was done.

It wasn’t long before there were babies. We would see them playing in this giant walnut tree — probably the original tree that has spawned all the other walnuts nearby.

The Handbook of Nature Study features red squirrels, and we have a few of those around, too. They’re ill-tempered fellows, often chasing the gray squirrels across the yard and biting them on their bottoms. They’re greatly outnumbered, but we’ve never observed a gray chasing a red — it’s always the other way around.

We assume that the information in the handbook pertains to gray squirrels too, so we went ahead and made our journal pages accordingly. I used a template from Barb’s newsletter, but the girls couldn’t wait for me to make copies and got started before I returned upstairs with them. They’ll use them next week!

The handbook says babies come in April, but it was May where we live — only about an hour from Ithaca, where Comstock wrote her book. I found some online sources that helped provide more details about squirrel reproduction:

• The Gray Squirrel Report
• A Squirrel Place
• The Eastern Gray Squirrel

The girls got a real tickle out of Comstock’s journal pages about Furry, the baby red squirrel she rescues and raises. They also loved the videos over at the Outdoor Hour — click the OHC button above to check them out for yourself! One of them describes an experiment to see the spatial memory of squirrels in action, and we’re in the process of trying it today.

We continued to enjoy the squirrels through the summer, when they would power lounge on hot days.

Occasionally we’d see the mother calling the juvenile squirrels, and they’d come running from treetops all around. One of the most interesting facts in the Handbook was that they have specific “roads” through trees and on the ground, and they do race pell-mell along these familiar routes, but they become more tentative when they venture off these trails.

She looks worried in this picture — almost like she’s wringing her hands.

I caught this one messing with a tent caterpillar nest in a walnut tree. Was he eating caterpillars, or bugs?

Now that the weather is cooler, we see them often huddled under their blanket-tails, eating walnuts.

I’ve noticed that the crows keep a close eye on the squirrels. More than once, after a squirrel has buried a nut and carefully smoothed and patted the ground over it, I’ve seen a crow immediately land and start poking around where the squirrel just put the nut. Once I watched the crow successfully extract the nut, but after holding it in its beak for a few minutes and turning its head to and fro, it left it and flew away. Must have been hoping for something a little more palatable.

My most recent Birds and Blooms magazine includes a photo from a reader who bakes tiny peanut butter cookies for the squirrels in her yard. I was seized by an inexplicable compulsion to try it.

I put one on their favorite stump and retreated to the window to watch.

It took about a half hour for one to discover the cookie.

The Eastern Gray Squirrel site says not to give squirrels “junk food” like bread, or even peanuts except in small quantities. But a cookie now and then is surely good for everyone.

There are other squirrel stories I could tell: the battle of wits between my husband and the squirrels over dominance of the bird feeder, for instance, or the “dead” squirrel that peeled itself off the pavement and dashed up a tree under my very nose. But I’ll resist.

All that remains is a rundown of some fun squirrel stories, and squirrel side characters, in the world of literary rodentry. Here are some that come to mind:

• The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes (Beatrix Potter)
• The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (Beatrix Potter)
• The Adventures of Chatterer the Red Squirrel (Thornton W. Burgess)
• The Adventures of Happy Jack (Thornton Burgess)
• Merle the High Flying Squirrel (Bill Peet)
• Those Darn Squirrels! (Adam Rubin)
• The Squirrels’ Thanksgiving (Steven Kroll)
• The Ordinary Princess (M.M. Kaye — features Mr Pemberthy the Squirrel as a side character)
• Prince Caspian (C.S. Lewis — features the valiant Pattertwig)
• And last but not least, though he’s not a literary squirrel, who could forget Rocky the flying squirrel?

What would you add to the list?

I realize squirrels can be pests, but they don’t really cause us any problems other than the bird feeder. They don’t get into the house or chew on things or eat our garden. (*Edited to add: Since writing this, I’ve read John Burroughs’ admonition that if you want birds to nest in your yard you should kill every red squirrel you see because they are responsible for pillaging more eggs and nestlings than any other predator. So I guess that’s a bit of rain on my squirrel parade!) They do give us lots of entertainment and are models of industry and athleticism. Here’s hoping one crosses your path today.

Be sure to visit the Outdoor Hour Challenge on the last day of November to see what other folks are learning about the world around them.