Sciurus carolinensis

Tree

Here's a pic of our homegirl.  Not exactly the pic I wanted to capture, as she usually is facing directly at the window.  This is taken through a double glazed window with the cloud covered sun behind her.

Yes, her, she is a nursing female and the boss of the local squirrel scurry.

The winter of 2018-2019 was a tough one for squirrels.  It was an off year for mast-the oaks dropped no acorns, and the same for the beech.  I got tired of the squirrels hogging all the bird feeders, so I started supplementing small piles of cracked corn spaced out along the hill path to the goats.

There was at least a dozen squirrels that came on a daily basis, usually showing up around 10:30 am  We even had a color mutation we named "Goldie" she had an absence of black coloration and was tawny and white.

My neighbors were not happy with the desperate squirrels-both known to shoot anything that encroaches on their rural properties, and I beeged both groups to "spare Goldie" if they went on a rampage.

I have not seen "Goldie" for over a year, whether she fell victim to a bullet or a bird of prey is unknown.  There is also the possibility that she saw no need to leave her territory last winter,(she was always one of the late arrivals the previous winter) as it was a crackerjack year for both acorns and beechnuts.

I know because I picked up several gallons off the goat path and left them by the back door, playing with the idea of turning them into acorn meal and attempting acorn pancakes.  It is quite a process of soaking, cracking, and shelling and drying and grinding, and I never got around to it.

The few squirrels that showed up in the back yard this winter thought that was the best acorn stash ever and ate most of the bucket.

I wish they had scrounged a little more through the asparagus and perennial beds out back since it took several days of raking and handpicking  MORE acorns unless I wanted to be pulling oak seedlings later in the year.  The ground was literally carpeted with them.

I had intended to use those leaves for garden mulch, but due to the massive amount of acorns I dumped them along the property line at the edge of the woodland.

One year I played with the idea of selling red oak seedlings, and potted up quite a few of them.  I gave some away and kept a few for a potential bonsai project.

We will have to see if acorn production is impacted by weather or is cyclical.  I have heard the term "off year" for fruiting trees-whether that is just the habit of the tree to fruit every other year, or if it depends on the type of weather during flowering season I am unsure.

One thing I am pretty sure on- we won't have a ton of maple keys, or seeds later.  We had that huge wet snow just as the red flower buds were swelling, and it has been cold and wet most of the month-not good conditions for pollination.

I have my beehives set as a swarm trap, but we have yet to see any honeybees.  One sure way I determine how local colonies overwintered is when the pussywillow buds mature, as honeybees cherish that as a pollen source and the small trees are low enough to the ground to inspect visually.

We have seen on or two tri colored bumblebees (Bombus ternarius) already this spring, and I expect to see the first hummingbirds any day.

Never speak in absolutes

My last post I mentioned how the grey squirrel poplulation seemed a shadow of it's former self.

Today, first thing this morning, there was a squirrel scene out back.  Squirrels running and jumping and chrring and crying.  My heart was pounding, it sounded like a hurt baby grey and I was not sure if the reds had attacked a nest, or what was happening?

The crying sound was coming from the treetops, so I retreated indoors.  Everytime I stepped out today, wah, wah, wah.

After the winter we had , if I am home, I am most likely outside.  damn the tics (I have had 6 bites already) damn the mosquitoes (I don't know how many I have smashed or how much alien blood I have unknowingly injected after smashing a mosquito biting me)

Not today, I could not handle the commotion.  I raised an Eastern grey squirrel from an orphan when I was in about 6th grade.  My mom found two on our front walk in metropolitan suburbia.  One of them had a compound fracture of the leg, so my mother took it to the vet.  The vet, a portly man who incessantly jingled his pockets full of change, thought there was no way to prevent gangrene, so that baby squirrel was euthanized.  The other one, uninjured, we were instructed to feed with...if I recall correctly...squeetened condensed milk warmed and thinned and poured in a saucer on a piece of bread...I think we may have bottle fed prior to the saucer.

Well, it was the funniest thing to see this baby grey with all four feet in the saucer sucking up that milk sopped bread!  Then we would have to clean him up with a warm damp cloth or he would dry all sticky and hard from the milk.

It took him awhile to get a nice bushy tail.  We built him a big cage out of chicken wire, a cylinder about 5 feet high and several feet in diameter that we kept on our porch.

The fall he was about a year and a half old, he bit my sister up pretty good.   She was trying to put him back in the cage after playing with him.

Well, that was that, my mother and I took him to some nearby woods and he climbed to the top of a tree and that was the last I ever saw of "squirrel."

Needless to say, I have been fond of grey squirrels for a long time.  When I moved to Maine I was surprised that I could not speak the Maine grey dialect.  They definitely have an accent!  The same with blue jays.  I have a brain cramp about the northern dialect and when I talk to them I use my mid atlantic version, and I don't think they get that.

Because when the grey squirrel commotion moved to the sunflower feeder and beech trees in the back yard today, I finally had enough!  I had been envisioning bottle rockets earlier in the day (which, even though you can buy huge fireworks now here in Maine, you can't get M80's or bottle rockets ) but I stepped out on the deck and gave those grey squirrels a down home cussing out...tsrrr, tsrrr, chstrrrr!

Two big ones closer to the feeder peered at me and each other.  The smaller one in the treetops hushed for a second.

 The best guess I could make was that parents were trying to teach their young how to protect themselves and find food, and sitting in the treetops crying was a great way to get eaten by a redtailed hawk, and dammit, you're a squirrel, learn to fall to the next branch and peel a stinking sunflower seed!!!!!


PS Once again I am mistaken.  I stepped outside just now and saw 7 large grey squirrels surrounding the sunflower feeder.  Bad weather coming???  Unusual animal behavior makes me wonder-another bad winter? 

Where have these squirrels been for the last several months? DO squirrels just move in roaming bands like a group of Tom turkeys?  Is is a set of parents and juveniles, and they are making the rounds showing the different places to feed?  Did one of my faithful readers drop a basket of squirrels on my head because I was complaining I hadn't seen any? 

Or maybe the wildlife rehab place-in the past I have seen young animals that don't really seem to know what they are doing and no parent in evidence.  Then when I caught the game warden releasing the mink a couple months ago I did feel rather exonerated because I KNOW animals get dumped here. 

I have taken in several cats and even a hen and rooster.  I know folks that went out one morning and found a mean white turkey in their animal pen.

It's the "That looks like a good place" mentality.  I have to admit, one year when I had four roosters and no one would answer my ad for free roosters, I would drive by a place with some pretty hens scratching in the front yard and think, "that looks like a good place...." but it was just a fantasy.

Unlike that game warden and the mink..."That looks like a good place!"

I should have told him during my tirade that when I was trying to trap "my" mink (which I didn't admit to doing) I fantasized that if I caught it I could release it by (where the game warden caught his), and then I thought that would not be nice to those people, and tried to think of a very remote place to release a mink...

NIMBY!

I did get very close to a small group of cedar waxings working the ditch when I walked down to check the mailbox this afternoon.  I have seen them before, working the alders in the swamp, and they are quite fearless with their dark eye bands, perching and calling- mere feet from eye level.

Seems early for them, too.