![\"Squirrel](\"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/20181001-Squirrel.jpg\")
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I don\u2019t know if squirrels abound where you live, but I can tell you that they abound here. Seems they’ve done a lot of \u201cabounding\u201d this year\u2014the fruit of their loins has been particularly bountiful. More seeds and nuts around than normal, perhaps?<\/p>\n
And the curious thing is that they all seem to have chicken fixations.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that they hanker after having their necks wrung.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that they think that laying eggs is cool.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not even the allure of being connected with the official mascot of the FIFA 2019 Women\u2019s World Cup.<\/p>\n
Quite simply, they want to cross the road.<\/p>\n
In order to get\u2026 anywhere, I have to drive along a tree-lined collector road to the main drag. This road runs parallel with a wooded river valley.<\/p>\n
And the road is alive (well, mostly alive) with tree rats\u2014I mean squirrels. There are black ones, grey ones, reddish ones\u2026 and flat ones, the last of these being a melange of the other three colours.<\/p>\n
These creatures have no clue how to cross a road safely. In fact, I think they deliberately take their chicken-wannabe-itis to the next proverbial level by playing chicken with the traffic. A squirrel will scurry across the grass verge (aka boulevard to western Atlanticans) into the road, stop, look alternately at the oncoming vehicle and the other side of the road a few times, then run across the road anyway.<\/p>\n
Twice in the last week, I\u2019ve stood my car up on its front bumper in an effort to avoid acquiring fur-lined wheel arches: the second time there was another vehicle close behind me, and it\u2019s a miracle it didn\u2019t rear-end me.<\/p>\n
Despite my abhorrence of the idea of killing an animal with my car, that experience taught me that perhaps I should let Darwinism do its job so that only street-savvy squirrels get to breed.<\/p>\n
Yet despite the number of flat squirrels out there providing an exotic change of diet for magpies and crows\u2014their everyday fare in these parts is Richardson\u2019s Ground Squirrels\u2014these tree squirrels continue to abound. In fact, they seem to be abounding more successfully than rabbits, an observation that may result in the changing of the saying \u201cbreeding like rabbits\u201d to \u201cabounding like tree squirrels\u201d.<\/p>\n
Are these chicken-squirrels lucky? Or do they rely on people like me to risk causing a traffic accident in order to save their apologetic derrieres? I honestly don\u2019t believe the latter\u2014squirrels aren\u2019t known for their intelligence. For example, we had coloured LED lights running around the fence of our back yard for a couple of years. One spring, we noticed the lights didn\u2019t work anymore. We took a closer look and discovered that all the red lights were on the ground; squirrels had chewed through the wires, presumably to try and get the \u201cberries\u201d. If they\u2019d done it while the power was turned on, perhaps we would have named the squirrel \u201cSparky\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ironically, back when I was a kid, and for many years after, the Road Safety people in the UK ran campaigns aimed at teaching kids how to cross the road safely, using a mascot that was\u2026 you guessed it\u2014a squirrel. Tufty<\/a> was his name, and I may even have joined the Tufty Club when I was about seven or eight. Based on what I observe these days, Tufty wasn\u2019t the greatest choice of role model for road safety. Perhaps his creators were taking a \u201cdon\u2019t do as I do, do as I say\u201d attitude.<\/p>\n And according to Wikipedia, there was a campaign more recently in the UK to save the indigenous red squirrel from the pesky American Grey variety. The campaign slogan\u2014Save a red, eat a gray!\u2014provides a clue about how the Brits were going about levelling the playing field for Tufty and his kinfolk.<\/p>\n But back to the abounding squirrels here and now. As I write this, our first snow storm of the winter is imminent (10cm forecast), and that usually makes life less comfortable for squirrels. What it will do to their \u201cchicken\u201d habits isn\u2019t difficult to guess. Food will become scarcer, the squirrels will get hungry and cold\u2026 and slow, and eventually the snow plow will have to double up as a roadkill remover. The thought of spring melt leaving behind poorly-preserved, two-feet-wide squirrels isn\u2019t pleasant.<\/p>\n When \u201cNature, red in tooth and claw\u201d competes with \u201cUrbanization, black in tire and asphalt\u201d, Nature usually comes second.<\/p>\n Perhaps I\u2019ll start a campaign to teach squirrels safe road-crossing habits. It\u2019s either that, or introduce them to family planning techniques that don\u2019t involve tire tread on the rubber.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don\u2019t know if squirrels abound where you live, but I can tell you that they abound here. Seems they’ve done a lot of \u201cabounding\u201d this year\u2014the fruit of their loins has been particularly bountiful. More seeds and nuts around than normal, perhaps? And the curious thing is that they all seem to have chicken fixations. It\u2019s not that they… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[488],"tags":[620,419,619,621],"class_list":["post-1351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bbs","tag-chicken","tag-roadkill","tag-squirrel","tag-tufty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}