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Thursday, September 04, 2008

Tell us your SQUIRREL Stories!

I have two; one from a loooong time ago and one from last Saturday.

It's the afternoon and Grizzly, our white haired chi, goes insane. He's barking so fast and so furiously that we're afraid his heart would explode... it seems a squirrel is trapped within our pool enclosure. It took awhile to find him but all we had to do was look up. In his panic, Mr. Furry Tail had shot up the screen and climbed up under the the porch roof. Once he stopped, he was in trouble. His little claws hooked through the mesh, he is too afraid to move. Suspended perilously 16 feet in the air, he doesn't move for ten minutes.

Finally, determining it would be harder to get his skeleton down, I resolve to help him. I put the leaf basket on the pool hook and reach up to scoop the hapless creature. No soap, he skitters away. Without the speed to clear the beams, Mr. Furry Tail plummets to the earth...

...fortunately straight into the pool. A perfect two point landing from the 16 foot high dive. Before I can even lower the pole, the demoralized rodent scrambles out of the deep end, his tail no longer fluffy, and scampers out the torn panel and up the tree. It was a near thing; he entered the pool six inches from the edge.

Second story. I'm a teenager on my parents back porch and Bear, our dimwitted hound, is chasing a squirrel in a ragged path across the yard. At top speed the squirrel is running around the yard table trying to keep away from the dog, however, the squirrel was faster than Bear and all of a sudden, the squirrel is chasing the hound who scampers across the yard with the squirrel in hot pursuit. Wonder what he would have done if he'd caught him...

I think the dog was embarrassed, as well he should be.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Remember the one time you had to save a squirell form a grass snake??? And we fed him maple donuts???

Rob said...

Why would we feed a grass snake maple donuts?

Annnnddddd no, I don't remember... more details?

Anonymous said...

When I was in high school, I worked at the skating rink and the owner found a squirrel that had fallen out of a tree, so he raised the squirrel and taught it how to water ski behind a remote control boat! Well that turned into something major. Ski Nautique became a sponsor and Chuck (the owner) got a free Ski Nautique every year because Twiggy (the squirrel) skied (sp?) behind a boat that had Ski Nautique on it. Twiggy was on tv, in movies and commercials. He had 3 other squirrels, Lights, Camera and Action. They were my favorites, because they were friendlier. There have been many Twiggys since then and even though Chuck died in 1998, his wife LouAnn still travels around the country with Twiggy. Just go to www.skiingsquirrel.com and you can see that I am telling the truth!

P.S. Chuck taught many different animals to ski. Ask me about Chips the miniature horse sometime!

P.S.S. Sorry for the spelling errors. Still not awake from Rock the Universe!

Anonymous said...

This might not be very exciting but will probably be the most- numerous-squirrels-as-pets:

I had a pet flying squirrel as a very young girl in the far frozen north of Illinois. Named him Rocky as in "... and Bulwinkle.

A friend rescued one but couldn't keep it so I took it... As a single girl living in O-town and going to nursing school, I couldn't keep him long, but named him Skipper.

After I got married, we had a couple of adopted/orphaned squirrels over the first years, Homer and Rascal. Steve even made large cages for them and they were part of our family.

Once our resident animal girl got into full swing, we've had lots of babies like Tipsy (rescued from friends' yard after Hurricane Charlie), and Wart ( we had her up until last October) and several left unnamed.

We now have a moratorium on ANY wild animals being brought into our home. Said animal girl tried to sneak one in last week, but I held firm!

Rob said...

Is living in cages a prerequisite for being a family member? Makes sense for Animal Girl, I guess...