Squirrel wars and a mouse story, too
By Mary Sharry
Sun contributor
The squirrels arrived the first summer when the English walnut tree bore nuts. The tree was perhaps nine or 10 years old and until the summer of the squirrels there had been nothing to show of its true nature. The walnuts were formed as walnuts are, perfectly, with the insides of their halved shells, the nut meat, resembling intricate passageways of brain tissue.
In the village of Empire there are several black walnut trees where red and Eastern gray squirrels busily snatch those nuts either before or after they’ve ripened. If the nuts aren’t yet ripe, a squirrel will bury it for safekeeping and if forgotten, voila! A new black walnut tree will be born. It’s entertaining to watch squirrels carrying large walnuts off to a burial spot. Sometimes a squirrel is chased by another squirrel and loses its treasure along the way. Such was the war we observed the summer when the English walnut tree first bore nuts.
Our first awareness that squirrels had moved away from the black walnut tree down the street to the English walnut tree where its branches hung over into our yard was when we observed a red squirrel running up the trunk, grabbing a walnut and scampering back down as squirrels do. This little creature made many trips back and forth. We weren’t sure where it was going with its treasure, but over several days it became bolder and ran up the screen of our slider door. How odd it was, the sight of a squirrel on the screen. From our perspective this little critter seemed to swim and swirl over the screen’s mesh in crazy patterns as it made its way upward to take a leap onto the tree branch.
We observed that red squirrel for about a week until one day an Eastern gray squirrel arrived. To add to the visual drama, the gray squirrel was in its black phase, so there was striking difference in size and color of the two animals. Another distinction, though, was the quick movement of the red squirrel — fast and feisty was he, or she. The red squirrel could out-maneuver the black squirrel and even turn on it to scold and hold its position. For another week or more we observed squirrels running back and forth, each climbing up the mesh screen in their odd swimming sort of fashion.
Sometimes the black squirrel would secure a nut from the tree, drop it to the ground, but before he could run down to retrieve it, the red squirrel would scurry in and make off with the fruit of the black squirrel’s labor. And so it went almost all that summer. Squirrel wars. Back and forth retrieving the lovely English walnuts. From scampering over the slider screen, the squirrels became even bolder and leapt to the rooftop. We could hear them pattering across the roof from one side of the house to the other, and this went on until the walnuts were all gone and a chilling rime had settled into the nights and coated leaves and grasses in the fields with hoar frost that sparkled in the morning sun.
Daylight was getting shorter, the nights longer. It was the time of year when we’d pop corn for an evening snack while playing a game of Scrabble or watching old “Northern Exposure” re-runs and that was when we began to hear a hurrying scuttle of tiny feet in the ceiling overhead and then another time in the wall. Oh dear! One of the squirrels had decided to lodge in our attic, and so we must buy a live trap. We weren’t really certain how this furry creature could have made its way in, but there was an opening in the drywall that went into our basement and I had a concern that he’d find his way inside our house, so perhaps we should place a trap near that hole in the drywall just in case. We didn’t want to seal up the opening for fear the squirrel would die of starvation in our attic or inside a wall. Poor squirrel, and bad smell! We were told that once we trapped the squirrel we must take it far away from our neighborhood, out into the country, to the woods somewhere, and not be surprised if it returned because they are very smart.
Squirrels love nuts, so logic told us to bait the trap with peanut butter dabbed onto bits of cracker or bread. We ate our popcorn and played our nightly Scrabble game and waited. The next morning the bait was gone, but the trap was empty of squirrel. The trap door remained open and the trigger mechanism to the door untouched. Obviously, we had a very smart squirrel. We set the trap again and again and again, and each time the treats disappeared but still no squirrel, no sign of entry into the trap. Someone suggested that perhaps we had a mouse, not a squirrel, so sorry to say we set out a different kind of trap, one not so kind as a live trap, and sure enough, the following morning we found a little deer mouse caught and dead in the trap.
By now winter’s cold had settled in. The Solstice came, Christmas and then New Year’s Day. Soon it was time for Winterfest in the village where frozen South Bar Lake provided smooth skating. There would be luminaries set up around the perimeter of the skating area. I could hardly wait to get down there to the ice, but upon retrieving my skates from the shelf in the basement I found them full of popcorn. So that was it, our intruder, the mouse had been drawn to the nightly bowl of unfinished popcorn which had been set out on the kitchen counter. What was disturbing was that sometimes in mornings I had grabbed a handful of the previous night’s popped corn, a great snack with morning coffee. Here I’d been sharing with a little mouse who must have climbed the stairs from the basement, up onto the counter, into the bowl, stuffed his cheeks and carried the popped kernels back down to the basement to store them in my skates. Imagine how many trips were made over so many weeks to build up a cache like that, filling a pair of size 8 ice skates.
Over time, when cleaning the house, I would find quantities of stale popped corn beneath the kitchen stove and refrigerator and way back in a drawer where there were stored candles, night light bulbs, bits of string, scotch tape, paper clips and rubber bands. That summer in cleaning out a closet we found popped corn in ski boots. Up in my writing room where I had an old box filled with notebooks and binders there was another accumulation of popped corn. The little mouse seemed to have covered most of the hidden areas of our house with its treasure.
How did the mouse get into the house? We figured that one cold night it had snuck in through an open doorway leading from the garage. Well, up until his sudden demise, he had made an honest living carting and storing popcorn. I still think there might be a day when I open another forgotten drawer or cardboard carton and will find some very stale corn.
