The nature do not stop surprising. Thoreau could have said it from his cabin by Lake Walden, Massachusetts, but I say it from my house in Viladrau, Osona. Not that I want to compare myself to the great writer and thinker who wrote “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, facing only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what life had to teach, lest when were about to die discover that he had not lived. They are profound words that invite reflection and that I fully subscribe to; and yet Thoreau did not have a squirrel’s nest in his garden, and I do.
It is necessary to clarify that squirrels of course that the man had (you will not miss the squirrels in a forest of Massachusetts) and in fact he described them wonderfully in the form of “little dancers” with “ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset”, ridiculous expression and gratuitous somersault. Very good, yes. But, I insist, never to my knowledge (he, who philosophized even with the loon, surely he would have explained it) did they raise squirrels at home and became part of his family.
For me, dedicated to observing the most important fauna, such as tawny owls and orioles, squirrels were, before nesting in my territory, secondary beings, inconstant, somewhat insipid in their gnawing identity, causing a few moments of distraction and joy with their jumps between the tall pines of the garden, and little else. In this he did not follow Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s teacher, who said that “the squirrel fills the eye no less than a lion.” Until one began to act in my environment in an unusual way for a squirrel. He spent much more time than usual on our land, staying for a long time on the same branches and watching us carefully. It seemed to me a very strange behavior and, always ready to plunge into the challenges of knowledge, mystery and adventure that nature offers us, I decided to investigate.
My squirrel, whom I started by baptizing chip-referring to the drawings chip and chop Walt Disney, of course-, it turned out to be a Eurasian red squirrel or common squirrel (Sciaurus vulgaris). One of the first things I discovered is that my chip and chop of reference, those that impregnated Pluto and Donald, were not red squirrels but North American chipmunks of the genus Tamias, what they call in English chipmunkand furthermore they were not originally called chip and chop otherwise Chip and Dale (in Spain the name was changed to the second). It was a first glimpse that much of what he thought he knew about squirrels was wrong. We generally think we know squirrels because we have seen them. in Ice Age (Scrat) or in merlin the charmerwhere the wizard and Arthur become two of them, or Operation Peanut (The nut job), with the nice Surly and Andie. But they are much more complex, and they even appear in the ramayanathe Kalevala Y the golden bough of Fraser. They appear (in addition to bambi) in poems by Yeats, Keats, and Wordsworth.
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With 278 species everywhere but Australia and Antarctica, the squirrel family, Sciuridae, includes relatives like prairie dogs, marmots, flying squirrels, ground squirrels, and tree squirrels like our red squirrels. These, “gifted athletes in fur coats”, as someone has baptized them (now I can’t remember if Yeats, Keats, Wordsworth or myself), are characterized by large tails, which serve as a seesaw for their jumps, but also to dissipate and conserve heat: sometimes they use it as a parasol and other times as a blanket. The particular anatomy of their joints makes them capable of descending the trunks of trees upside down (something I don’t know if they have tried but it is tremendously difficult). The characteristic tufts of hair on their ears are seasonal; they smell, hear and see much better than we do, although they do not distinguish red from green; there are black and albino; they do not migrate or hibernate (holarctic tree dwellers); They are omnivorous and can eat candy, chicken wings and pizza, although they are generally content with pineapples, seeds and nuts, which characteristically work with very sharp teeth that can cause painful injuries if you try to catch them. They tend to store food in caches that they remember with surprising skill. The two sexes are the same, unless you look closely.
Red squirrels are not very social, even with me, and do not interact with others except to mate, and the female with the young. They mark their (my) territory by leaving drops of urine on the branches or rubbing them with their perineum (I’ve read this but haven’t seen it). Nor have I observed them having sex, which is quite a scene because they practice the so-called mating chase, in which there may be several males chasing a female in estrus shouting “muk-muk, muk-muk”. The result of multiple copulation is that females can give birth to the same litter with different fathers, as DNA proves. The males fight fiercely among themselves over the females: the great squirrel specialist Richard W. Thorington of the Smithsonian mentions seeing a male biting the scrotum of a rival.
Not only for all that the life of the squirrels is not very idyllic. They have many enemies, among their predators are birds of prey, foxes, snakes, mustelids, dogs and cats. Also bears, coyotes, and wolves, but you don’t have to worry too much about those in Viladrau. Nor from the settlers who used the famous Kentucky rifles to shoot them by the millions (still a hobby today in the US) and cook squirrel pies. They suffer from parasites and the deadly squirrel pox virus (SQPV), which wreaked havoc on the How Forest colony in the Eskdale Valley in Cumbria, where they lived. Belinda, Wounded Soldier, Charles Y Camila (see Belinda, the forest How red squirrel, by photographer Peter Trimming, The Book Guild, 2016). Gestation lasts about 40 days and the care of the young, which leave the nest after 37-58 days, about 70.
Stocked with all this overwhelming amount of data – garnered much of it from Squirrels, the animal answer guideby Thorington and Kati Ferrell (John Hopkins University Press, 2006)-, my binoculars, and the time others spend socializing or napping, I have spent weeks following in the footsteps of Chip. Under the watchful eye of my cat Charlie, to which Chip uncharacteristically annoyed from the branches with indignant screeches and warnings, the squirrel wandered back and forth through the trees from various parts of the garden, stopping to work and delightfully taste the green shoots of my Ukrainian neighbors’ cedars (yes, I know it would have been a chronicle more current than that of the squirrels). Chip he always returned to a point that, one is not entirely stupid, I ended up identifying as his nest. It was in the fork of two branches at the top of a pine tree that was topped by a gust of wind years ago. The squirrel had built, taking advantage of the broken branches and various plant material, a perfectly camouflaged aerial burrow. She spent a lot of time nearby, perched on a branch, strangely motionless for a squirrel.
Days passed and one morning I was reading Anne Carson (A few words about the important and the trivial: “The important things are the wind, evil, a good war horse, prepositions, inextinguishable love…”) I raised my head and saw a miniature squirrel come out of the nest, followed by another, and a third so dark It looked almost black. They clung to the trunk for a long time, and it seemed to me one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. The important things, yes. The mother watched them closely and I wanted to read in her gaze when she met mine a kind of pride, shared. I haven’t seen them again. They have probably already become independent. I don’t know what will become of them. 75% of squirrels die before their first birthday. ,
Despite everything, I am optimistic about the future of my family of squirrels, and I hope they can avoid hawks, snakes, martens, falls, transformers and electrical cables, and other dangers. I have installed several special feeders for them, cleared paths, frightened off potential predators (the one-eyed cat of the Masía del Montseny) and I have read with hope that the squirrels can have two litters a year. Chipdear, you already know that this is your house.
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