Wildlife
by Betsy S. Franz

My husband and I are both nature lovers. That is the reason we chose the heavily treed piece of property that we ended up building our home on. The fact that we can sit on the property and on any given day see owls, herons, turtles, snakes, raccoons, hawks and an unlimited number of songbirds and other wildlife makes us feel like we own our own little piece of paradise.

So when, during the construction of our home, the brick masons told us that they saw a squirrel nesting up in the eaves, we met the announcement with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the nature lover sides of us were intrigued. On the other hand, our house building project had been slowed down enough because of all the work we had been doing ourselves. We had no desire to put things on hold while the mother squirrel raised her young. Also, from what we could see of the nest, the mother was using pieces of our house to make her nest…backing off of drywall, pieces of foam insulation …and she had chewed right through a piece of electrical wire that happened to be in her way.

Our plan was to knock the nest down before she had a chance to have her babies. After all, the nest had only been up there a few days (or so we thought). We were sure that she had not had a chance to have any babies yet.

When we saw the mother away from the nest, Tom put on leather gloves, climbed a ladder, and gently began pulling out the pieces of paper and grass that made up the nest and dropping them to the ground below him. The mother squirrel sat in a tree nearby making her angry chittering noises at us but watching from a distance. When Tom reached in and pulled out a large clump of nesting material, to our dismay, we heard a very loud peeping noise and the mother squirrel literally attacked Tom. He jumped back off the ladder in surprise, dropping the nesting material to the ground, along with the two hairless, pink baby squirrels that were inside. The mother climbed right up the ladder and into the area that previously held the nest. Tom gently put the babies back into the nesting material on the ground and I sat back in a lawn chair and watched them from a distance while Tom went back in to continue on some work he was doing on the house. Eventually, the mother came back and one by one, gently picked up the babies in her mouth and carried them back up the side of the house to the old nest location. The babies were safe, for the time being, but we still didn't know what to do to get them out of our house.

The next weekend we tried again. We decided the best course of action was to try to relocate the nest. Our plan was to take down the nest with the babies in it and put it in one of the many oaks on our property and hope that the mother would go to it. Leery of another attack by the mother, we took what we hoped were adequate precautions to get the babies out without harming them or getting attacked by the mother. Tom used the blunt end of a long handled tree trimmer to reach behind the nest and try to pull it forward. I stood below with a long-handled shrimp net, ready to catch the nest as it fell. Tom began pulling material out of the nest and we both kept a close watch to see if we could see any babies or see if the mother looked like she was going to attack. Eventually, a large piece of the nest fell out into my net, along with at least one baby, and we backed away while the mother squirrel scampered around chittering in anger.

Unfortunately, when we looked in the nest, we only saw one baby. Tom placed the nest securely into the crevice of a nearby oak. We weren't sure what happened to the other baby squirrel, but almost immediately saw the mother with the little one in her mouth running to another corner of the eaves.

At a loss for what to do next, Tom went back to work on the house and I pulled up a lawnchair to see what would happen. I was hoping the baby squirrel that we had relocated would cry so that its mother could find it, but it never did. I sat there for four hours watching and waiting, and eventually felt that I had no choice but to bring the baby home. I just wasn't sure the mother would find it and I couldn't stand the thought of it dying up in the nest all alone or being eaten by an owl or other predator.

For some reason, Tom ended up naming him Horatio. I never really had any desire to be the mother to a squirrel, but I did take great pleasure and care in raising that baby. Our plan was to raise him just until he was old enough to release into the wild, so we were very careful not to make him too tame by handling him more than necessary. We kept him in a very large cage which we eventually moved to our new home after the construction was finished.

Horatio lived for almost exactly a year. One morning we woke up and he had just died in his sleep. There were no external signs of what could have killed him. But with all the mothering and care I had given him, it was a very sad loss.

The lesson we learned from our experience with this little squirrel was a valuable one. We learned that it is best to let nature take its course when it comes to the wildlife on our property. Other than planting animal friendly plants and a few bird feeders that we keep stocked with seed, we try to neither encourage or discourage the wildlife that lives within our forest.