Essay - Squirrel Problems

by Sam Low

Vineyard Gazette

I’m gonna shoot them.

They carry on at all hours. They ignore polite suggestions. I bang on the walls but it does no good. They think their tenure is more righteous than mine because they’ve been year round residents all their lives and I’m a converted summer person who has yet to vote at town meeting. A wash-a-shore.

A while ago I mixed up some poison but I couldn't go through with it. What if they die up there and stink? Another reason – poison is for cowards. Our antagonism deserves a more Darwinian approach. I need to prove that I’m more evolved than they are. But so far our battle seems to demonstrate the opposite.

They have some real advantages. For starters, they’re younger and more agile. I can’t help but admire them as they leap from my roof to a nearby tree trailing a few well-chosen expletives. And they’re naturally endowed with tools that I have to buy at the store.

A week ago I got out my skill saw and fashioned a plywood patch to fit over their door into my house. They reduced that to dust in a few hours – with their teeth. I made another patch of red cedar, ¾ inch thick. I waited.

Massachusetts’s law recognizes their skills. Professionals need a special license to kill one. You take a course, pay a fee, and can then legally snuff sixteen species of mammals, three of birds and one turtle. You get the title of Problem Animal Control Agent - but you don’t get a double O number. I learn that under Chapter 131, Section 37 of “The Rules” even I have a license to kill - on my own property. I feel empowered.

But then I remember the first time I shot anything. I was twelve. My father had taught me to use a twenty-two. I shot beer cans in the back yard (not here, in a rural part of Connecticut). I told him I wanted to hunt. “Let’s see,” he said. We went into an apple orchard; found a squirrel in a tree. I aimed, shot, nothing happened. The squirrel hunkered down on the limb. I missed! Thank God! Then he fell at my feet. I can’t say that I never shot at another living creature again, but I can say that I always missed.

I decided against shooting them. 

I heard them gnawing on the cedar patch for three days, and then the skittling of little feet in the void over my closet. I admired them for that.

I cut a hole into the overhead and learned the extent of their remodeling. Leaves fell out, then stored nuts, and little flakes that I can only think must be dried excrement. If they would only be quiet up there, I might learn to live with them. And if they were toilet trained.

I went on the Net. 

I found dozens of sites right off – a measure of the ubiquity and power of their species or of the amount of time people have on their hands. Here’s one entitled “All Squirrels Must Die,” the homepage of the “Squirrel Defamation League.” They boast 21,179 visitors since October 19th, 1999. That’s more than our winter population. Here’s another called the “Anti-squirrel coalition – Indiana chapter.”

“Our main enemy is the squirrel,” the Indiana folks say. “If you look into the eyes of a squirrel you can tell he's thinking. His main concerns are not just burying nuts and stroking his bushy brown tail, if he gets the chance he'll cut your throat in a heartbeat.”

But there’s another side to all this. A website called “Long Live Squirrels,” for example, posted by the “Squirrel Rights League.”

What makes some people love squirrels and others hate them? I found a correlation with residence. Squirrel lovers seem to be urban dwellers while squirrel haters reside in the sticks. Politics enters in. Lovers are Republicans and haters are Democrats. A Squirrel Rights League study showed that 49% of Pro-Squirrel People were Republican while only 16% were Democrat. Then I read the small print. The researcher was biased - both a squirrel lover and a Republican. In microcosm even our silliest institutions reflect our society at large. Where’s the truth?

Squirrel behavior is hotly debated. In the 1980s, Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson discovered a Darwinian urge to succeed in certain animal species impels alpha males to kill infants spawned by their competitors. His theory is gospel among squirrel haters. “Squirrels kill and castrate other squirrels,” they claim. “A male squirrel will invade the tree of an enemy squirrel and bite off the testicles of the young in the nest.”

Squirrel haters relish accounts of squirrel attacks. In Fairhaven Connecticut, for example, it’s reported that a squirrel attacked a 75-year-old woman and terrorized a mail carrier. One police officer on the scene is quoted as saying: “the squirrel went nuts.” The Owensboro, Kentucky Messenger-Inquirer published a report of a squirrel attacking a number of people, even running up the pants of a man repairing an air conditioner (think of what they do to enemy squirrels and that will scare the Be-Jesus out of any man). The wife of the air conditioner repairman finally subdued the animal. She killed it with a kitchen knife. Later in the same year, the Messenger-Inquirer told about a squirrel that caused a power outage by getting into a “pot head" where an underground cable connects to a utility pole. Is a “cluster” of squirrel attacks developing in Owensboro? Yes, say squirrel haters and it may presage a millennial outbreak of squirrel violence all over America.

I learned that squirrels mate in February. Gestation takes about 44 days. They give birth to as many as nine young ones. “Nine,” I thought, “in February?”

I got the poison out again. I reconsidered buying a gun. Instead, I put up another wooden patch - covered with chicken wire. They began gnawing again. This time from the inside. Did I lock them in? Do they have another entrance? I began slapping the walls with a broom making a sound like a shotgun reverberate through their quarters. Whaaaappp...

Even dead squirrels can be dangerous. Newsweek suggested a connection in Kentucky (where hunters kill a million squirrels each year) between eating squirrel brains and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, CJD, which causes symptoms similar to mad cow disease. I remember a recent news article about CJD popping up mysteriously in the U.S. Do the people at the Centers for Disease Control read Newsweek? Should I call them?

The invasion of my furry foes raises issues that are not trivial. They are cosmic, bringing into question theories of behavior, both human and animal; our conception of appropriate levels of violence; rural-urban differences; the origin and spread of disease; and, as one state biologist put it, “our ability to tolerate the forces of nature.”

My tolerance was reaching its limits. They were up there gnawing. I banged on the walls. They stopped... began again. I decided that when I put up the new chicken wire patch I had locked them in rather than locking them out. I went up and opened their door. The gnawing and skittling stopped. I didn’t see them leave so I decided to wait before closing the door again. I waited one night. Then another.

“You may have made it uncomfortable enough for them so they won’t come back,” a state biologist told me. “They don’t like to live in a place that may be dangerous. They worry about their kids just like we do.”

“What,” I thought, “they can’t tolerate me?”  He’s obviously a squirrel lover. Can I trust him?