Those Cwazy Squirrels

Now that my TMB has been resolved, I am back on the job, with hopes that my flow of verbiage can continue without further interruption.

Yesterday, I saw a provocative item on CNN about the disappearance of acorns. Now, if you are a seeker of useless yet interesting bits of effluvia such as myself, how could you pass up an article entitled "Scientists baffled by mysterious acorn shortage"?


To summarize the article, it has been observed in various pockets of the East Coast that there are not as many annoyingly crunchy oak reproductive devices littering the ground as there usually are. The consensus seemed to be that it is too soon to become concerned about an oakless future. There were lots and lots of acorns last year, and the trees were just exhausted. Then, the article went on to discuss the plight of squirrels with no acorns to eat.

One would think that this would be a welcome problem, especially since it means that there is less food for the squirrels, which I think of as rats with bushy tails, or pigeons with fur. You may choose your own annoying animal simile.


Sorry, but however cute Disney-rendered squirrels may be, to me they are just a form of rodentia. They can chew into homes and make a terrible mess. They do irrational things like waiting on the side of the road until your car is almost upon them, then they dash frantically out into the middle of the road, causing you to swerve to avoid them.


You know that they are doing this on purpose just to mess with your head.

I realize that the disappearance of squirrels might lead to one of those circle-of-life issues, wherein something else that preys on them would have trouble surviving, like red-tailed hawks or foxes or owls. But there would still be other tiny vermin for these vastly more interesting creatures to eat, like mice and chipmunks.

On the other hand, perhaps squirrels can be useful creatures. My grandmother, an intrepid gastronome, served us up some squirrel at some point in my childhood. They do make pretty good eating, as I recall, and taste sort of like...chicken.

You might perhaps wonder from whence my antipathy to the chubby-cheeked chatterers arises.

Well, I'll tell you.

Years ago, I had an apartment on an older, tree-lined street in the Roxborough section of Philadelphia. The apartment was in a charming old house, on the second floor. A large sycamore tree stood a few feet from the house, with spreading branches that essentially were sidewalks for the squirrels that inhabited the tree.

Sidewalks that led straight to the house I lived in.

The squirrels chewed there way into the attic of the house, where they scampered night and day, sounding like a herd of elephants right over my bed (gray squirrels can weigh as much as a pound and be 18 inches long). It was incredibly creepy.

I actually consulted the services of a pest control company, which informed me that it was very difficult to keep the bushy-tailed little monsters out of an old house like the one I lived in, without cutting the tree down.

Since I didn't own the house, and I really liked the apartment, there was little I could do but put up with the pests. So, for pretty much the entire two years I lived there, I tried to ignore them, although I did sometimes fantasize about getting a shotgun and blasting through the ceiling, like Elmer Fudd in a Warner Brothers cartoon.

Fortunately, I do not see many squirrels around my current home, even though there are many trees. Perhaps the hawks and foxes are keeping them at bay.

Or, perhaps, they are all out playing in traffic.