I promise this space won’t be perpetually filled with stories of squirrels, but after my last, I received a few emails I just had to share.
“Your recent column reminded me of my own squirrel story from about 25 years ago,” wrote David Miller, a former Charlestonian who now lives in Oak Harbor, Washington.
“It was a warm afternoon in early spring,” wrote David. “We had the windows open and our jumbo Newfoundland puppies were in the yard. From inside I could hear one of them playing with a squeaky toy in the yard.
Squeak! Squeak! Squeak! drifted in through the window, when suddenly it occurred to me, ‘Hey, they don’t have any squeaky toys outside!’”
David raced out back and found his nine-month-old (but already 120-pound) puppy playing with a baby squirrel.
He managed to get the pup to drop the squirrel and after wrangling the dogs inside the house, he went back out into the yard, where his three-year-old son was standing over the squirrel pup, which was now limp in the driveway, barely breathing, saturated in dog slobber.
“It had apparently fallen from its nest, where the dog discovered it,” David said. “I decided the most humane thing to do would be to put it out of its misery, but with my 3-year-old looking up at me with his giant saucer eyes, I decided on an alternate plan.”
David put the squirrel in a shoebox and explained that he was going to take it to the vet.
“I told him, ‘They’ll know what to do,’ but my plan was to handle it myself, away from my son,” David said. “Except he insisted on coming along.
“When we arrived at the vet, I passed the shoebox across the counter, explaining the situation. With a smile and a wink, the receptionist told us, ‘We’ll take care of it.’ My son beamed. I was relieved. Problem solved.”
Skip ahead a couple of months, when David returned to the same veterinarian’s office with his pups, to get them another round of shots.
“The receptionist looked at me and asked if I was there to get my squirrel back,” David said. It turns out she had nursed it back to health, and then took it home with her, where it was happily running around her apartment.
“Imagining a mammoth vet bill, I stammered, ‘Um. Ah. Er. No.’
“The receptionist just smiled and said, ‘I’ll keep it.’” To which David said, “Whew.”
Another reader wrote to say she once returned home to find her place had been ransacked. “It looked like the robbers had gone room to room and shelf to shelf, knocking over everything they could. Pictures were off the walls. Curtains were dangling off the rods. It was an absolute mess.”
Yet nothing appeared to be missing. There was even cash still laying on the counter and jewelry out in the open.
She had already phoned the police and was waiting on them to arrive when she went into her bathroom and found the fluffy-tailed culprit.
She said the squirrel, which had somehow gotten into her house, was pressed against the shower stall, panting hard. Her fat, old cat was slouched against the other wall, appearing equally exhausted. The chase had apparently been going on for hours.
And finally, while we’re still on the subject of squirrels, a friend shared the story about her aunt, who was dealing with squirrels in the attic of her very “posh” home.
“My aunt read somewhere that one way to chase away attic squirrels was to allow a cat to walk around up there for a while and spread their scent,” said Becca. “But she’d been afraid her cats would get stuck or refuse to come back.”
So, rather than risk it, her aunt decided to fish some of the nastier bits from her cat’s litter box and put it in baggies, which she then pierced full of holes and tossed up into the attic. The first half dozen didn’t work, but the second six did the trick. The squirrels left.
As did her aunt, the following year. Not remembering to retrieve the bags from the attic before moving out.
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November 27, 2020 at 08:00PM
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Smell the Coffee: Squirreling away more nutty tales - Charleston Gazette-Mail
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