Squirrel Babies

June 22, 2017

There is a new clutch of baby squirrels in the garden, just recently arrived. A tiny tribe of four wild foragers, marauding the bird feeder and surrounding greenery with gleeful abandon.

These same four, I’m quite sure, were raised in a nest on the roof above my bed, or more precisely, over my bedroom, in a space unable to be found from within the house, or from above, on the rooftop. An almost mythical space which seems to reside somewhere between the bedroom ceiling and the high ceiling’d livingroom rooftop.

The sound of their night-time antics as they grew from helpless sightless newborns to adventurous young squirrel toddlers was quite distinct. A fluttering and scratching of tiny little paws along the edges of their closed in nest that rose in cyclic crescendoes culminating in a series of mighty thumps. “Flutter, scritch, scratch, flutter flutter THUMP!”

The rythmic scratching and clawing, running and jumping that circled the corner of the ceiling like an invisible, if not silent, dervish in the darkness seemed to commence at lights out in the room below. Perhaps their mistaken assumption that ‘lights out’ was code for ‘coast is clear’ in native squirrel tongue. Although, being born with eyes shut tight for the first month, it’s hard to know how they knew this. “Flutter flutter thump! Flutter flutter, scratch scratch scratch THUMP! THUMP!”

Falling asleep was the trick of it. If you could fall asleep, it was all good – their patter was soft enough not to wake the sleeping, but loud enough to make it hard to find your way there.

I wondered if the games were due to their parents being home and making them feel safe enough to play, or due to their absence. But squirrels are generally not nocturnal, at least to my knowledge, and so I came to think it was the former, rather than the latter.

Now that they have arrived in the garden, eyes wide open, taking on the world, they’ve brought the party with them. The frolicking is full on, with an absolute and complete lack of any decorum.

They swing from the feeder, knocking tree swallows, grossbeaks and nut-hatches into the air with abandon. They scamper through crowds of mourning doves on the ground below, setting off great waves of beating wings in short disheveled, awkward flight. Doves crash-landing into the blue spruce, as others tumble down across the lower meadow in disarray; everybody cooing and chirping their outrage at the reckless careening of tiny squirrel bodies in high speed chase and pursuit.

They jump and whirl and wind along the slender outstretched limbs of the Japanese maple, They swing themselves up the sides of the trellis and fling themselves from trellis posts and outstretched limbs of the English Laurel. They seem to defy gravity as they leap and race through the high curving branches of the incense cedar. It’s pure mayhem, and they are clearly enjoying themselves in every minute of it.

There is also a complete lack of fear, on their part. Of anything at all, it would seem. They will sit on the bird feeder in their little gang of four – two on the branches two on the feeder – tossing seed about as if it were confetti at a wedding and chirping happily.
When I approach, there is bearly a ripple through their conversation, and certainly no one makes a move to escape or run away.

Indeed, they blink at me curiously and approach, tentative and light as only baby squrrels can be – extending their tails like jousters’ spears over their heads – flattening and twitching the tails menacingly as their tiny little faces peer out from beneath. They look like nothing so much as tiny sailors in their vessels, great sails overhead, their shields of protection and seeming invisibility. It is perhaps, the most hysterical demonstration of complete ignorance of their true disposition I have ever seen displayed by a wild creature – but of course, they are mere babes and have no idea of their perril.

Were the dog not 14 years old and mostly deaf and blind, they would already be history, but as it is, they bask in their jollity and ride their schooner tails into the fray of encounters with my garden booted feet. They sally forth into my squash beds and climb the strings and trellises in high speed games of tag and chase and sit calmly on the deck next to my lemon trees contemplating the blossoms and sweet fragrances.

So far, they have only managed to decapitate a few of the marigolds in the vegetable beds, which are but minor sins in the vegetable garden kingdom. With any luck they will not expand their tom-foolery to actual destruction of property worthy of an all out assault on their presence. I like them, after all, with their wild and reckless ways, and their great and mighty schooner tails of protective magic spells. They irritate the jays, which I also find amusing, especially as the jays are so about the business of irritating everyone else.

But I fear they may need some schooling and I hope their parents are about and planning on the tasks without delay. Because they aren’t the only babies being raised in the space outside my window between the garden and the woods. And those other parents are quite seriously about the business of their rearing, with daily training flights and hunting calls across the fields. Their young are standing guard on the top wires of the garden fence and calling as they drop down from the heights of the forest’s edge. Their sharp eyes learning and scanning through the beds and under shady leafy bowers in the comfry hedge. And it won’t be long, I fear, before the rolicksome squirrel babies will learn the limits of their magic schooner tails. For though they may feel safely hidden peering out from below, from up above the sight is clear: a squirrel tail, don’t you know?