Critter Getters

I could tell you this story without a picture, but it could conceivably end up being a 500-page book. So to make my storytelling a bit less cumbersome, here's the layout of my mother's house. I was there yesterday. I remember. We were just about to leave to go out for lunch. As I was coming out of the bathroom, I saw a squirrel run from the sliding glass doors where my mom was standing, across the den, and into the dining room. My first thought was, "What the....?!" and then my next thought was to close the hall door so that if the squirrel continued to run, she (yes, I'm sure of the gender as you will soon find out) wouldn't be able to go down the hall where the bedrooms are. Meanwhile, my mom followed the path of the squirrel, closing the door from the kitchen to the dining area behind her so that the squirrel couldn't leave that room. She also went across the room to open the front door so that the critter would have an escape hatch.

I kept hearing a loud chirping noise in the den so I went toward the glass doors to investigate and found a newborn baby squirrel. The umbilical cord was gone, but its little eyes weren't even open yet. Apparently its mama dropped it there, and there I left it.

I went into the living room to see how my mama was faring with shooing the squirrel mama outdoors. Mama didn't actually see the squirrel go out the front door, but we were both pretty sure that it was gone. I looked under the furniture and didn't see anything, so we closed the open front door before something else unwanted came in! As a precaution, we left the door from the dining room to the kitchen closed.

Well, my mom didn't know that she still had another squirrel in the house, so I showed her. She put on gloves and was going to pick it up, but I thought maybe she should scoop it up with something instead (it was very much alive). So, she scooped it up with a dustpan, and then we had the dilemma of what to do with it. She went out the sliding glass door, but she didn't just want to put the helpless little thing on the ground-level patio. So, she decided to go put it on the front porch that is rather high off the ground, and hope that the mama squirrel would hear its cries and come back for it.

At this point in time I asked how the squirrel had gotten into the house in the first place. I assumed that since Mama was standing by the sliding doors when I first saw her and the squirrel that it had come in that way. But it didn't. Mama had heard her dogs barking at something on the carport, so she opened the kitchen storm door to see what they were barking about. She didn't see anything, so she walked away. That door has a faulty pneumatic closer, and although the door will eventually close all the way, it takes a while. She thinks that the squirrel was under one of the cars and that when it saw the door hanging open behind her, it ran in to get away from the dogs.

So, we picked up where we left off and continued to get ready to go out to lunch. When we went out to the car, we discovered that her little dog had found the baby squirrel before its mama did. So brief a life, and so sad, but neither of us thought beforehand about that possibility. If the squirrel mama had been a better nest-builder the baby wouldn't have fallen out anyway. (At least that's what we surmised happened.) So, we went to lunch.

When we returned home and were sitting in the den, here came the squirrel mama to the sliding glass doors. She paced back and forth, peered inside, scratched at the door, then left. A few minutes later, she did it again. And again. She knew where she'd left that baby. I told Mama I was going to call her at 3 a.m. when I was having baby squirrel nightmares.