Essays

Wild On The Prairie: Mammals

Who da’ fool who thought Midland needed tree squirrels?
June 22, 2003

Squirrels are cute, I know. They are fun to watch – non-stop tail jerking, hindquarter trembling, rear leg stomping, chirping, squealing, and whirring – running climbing, and jumping. Lordy, they can make a person dizzy. They can make a person mad, too – ever had one get into an attic and destroy some keepsakes to build a nest, or gnaw on some insulation and cause a short in the wiring of a house?

Years ago, my mom’s mentor, Ola Dublin Haynes, had a squirrel at the 201 North “D” Street “Wild Bird Café.” Her squirrel was a male that had been trapped on some relative’s land somewhere to the east of Midland. For years afterward, in the area just west of Bowie Elementary, a squirrel or two could be found, but the population did not seem to grow. In the last five years, however, we have witnessed a “tsunami” of fox squirrels taking over this town.

“We are up to our ears with the varmints,” reported a gentleman who informed me that in 2002 he killed 87 of the “bushy-tailed rats” in his backyard – he is a heck of a shot with a BB gun! “I had a house burn down when I lived near Houston – they chewed the electric lines and the resulting short caused the fire, so I am not letting them get started here!” He did admit that no matter how many he killed, more kept coming.

They are almost everywhere in town – from the trees of Hogan Park to Bluebird Lane and down to Business 80 and the railroad tracks. We had our very first one at the Sibley Nature Center the very same day a few weeks ago that three unrelated people called requesting a squirrel story in the Midland Reporter Telegram.

“The Goddess is trying to tell you should write it” commented an audience member that same day, during a program I presented to an earth-based feminist religious study group. By the way, that group was scheduled right after a group of home-schooled students with a curriculum based on fundamentalist Christian tenets. All in all, an interesting day, to say the least.

About a year ago I gave a talk entitled “The history of horticulture on the southern Llano Estacado” to over 150 landscape professionals seeking CEU’s to maintain their professional chemical applicators licenses, and in passing, I mentioned the spread of the squirrels. After the program, a gentleman stopped me on my way out of the CEED building – “Hey, buddy – wanna get the low-down on how the squirrels got here?”

Looking both ways, I pulled him over to the side of the entry hall. “Yeah,” I answered, sotto voce, figuring he wanted to tell me he was to blame, and did not want anybody else to know.

“You know those big trees brought to Midland on 16 wheelers and wrapped in netting? When we get a tree off of those big rigs and set it in the ground, they still have squirrel nests. The momma and the babies stay in those trees, scared to death. I have seen squirrel families scooting away at least a dozen times, myself, after we cut the netting and shook out the branches.”

Most likely, the gentleman’s explanation is the best – no other method of introduction would have imported enough squirrels quickly enough for individuals to find mates. With few dogs and cats able to catch the squirrels and no nesting species of hawk within the city limits (except for the one pair of Kestrels on the Hilton), the little rodents have been able to establish themselves quite well.

A friend of mine has “rehabbed” a couple of baby squirrels. She conferred with a veterinarian who gave her the proper medicines and formulas and showered her with information he downloaded of the Internet. “They are so personable! Rocky would just chatter and chatter at me when I came home from work.” My friend did not wish to be identified – she did not want to be deluged with other orphan animals. “It is hard work – unless you are willing to make the commitment, you shouldn’t even try.” The squirrels she raised were released on a ranch in central Texas, where one disappeared immediately, and the other vanished in a week or two.

Mammalogy professor Vagn Flyger, a leading squirrel expert that spent thirty years studying one Maryland squirrel population commented in a 1970’s National Wildlife Magazine, “When a “tame” squirrel is released, it can’t make it.” To survive a squirrel relies on its internal map of its 10 to 20 acres of territory; a map imprinted first by schooling from its parents, and then by the hard lessons of narrow escapes, and constantly fashioned by the pattern of the change of vegetation over a full year’s time. (Normally they do not roam much, but during massive acorn failures, forest squirrels sometimes migrate in huge numbers, searching for new habitat.)

We humans are ambivalent about squirrels. Condemnatory sorts can gloat in the following; males urinate on females to claim them, one squirrel rolled up attic insulation into a three-foot round ball, one caught and released came back 5 miles to the same tree, squirrels go through a mange cycle that will decimate the population every 10 years, a malaria-like parasite is found in every squirrel, and there are recorded cases of rabies in a squirrel.

The folks that want to hear positive information can enjoy these tidbits; there can be up to two sets of two to four young each year, our fox squirrels usually have a favorite feeding perch to which they will carry their food, in the winter an extended family of dozen squirrels sometimes will use the same nest, the young’s eyes are closed for a month and then remain in the nest for seven more weeks before learning about the neighborhood, and “they are sooo Ke-ute!”

Our squirrel at Sibley did not stay long. When it first appeared, it was in the southeastern-most oak tree in Hogan Park. At eight thirty in the morning it explored the Aubrey and Jean Reid Native Plant Garden for an hour or more. It finally scampered to the live oak (that we leave unpruned so it illustrates the natural growth tendencies of the species) on the west end of the demonstration red-cedar windbreak. Program presentations and drop-in visitors deflected my attention until late afternoon.

Wanting a diversion, I decided to see if I could find it, or other squirrels that might be in the park. I saw Mississippi kites, ground squirrels, dozens of strutting and croaking grackles, several swooping scissortail flycatchers, twenty or more dapper yellow-chested and gray-backed western kingbirds, cactus wrens, two dozen mockingbirds, and several hundred mourning doves and white-winged doves. Lordy, there was lots of life moving around in the park as the afternoon thunderstorms built up!

Some of the park’s regular humans were present, too – Patrick Dearen doing his power-walking, the fellow from ClayDesta Plaza, the local policeman on patrol letting his car idle at oozing speed, and the trysting lovers that try to hide their cars behind the Women’s Club. I finally found the fox squirrel – in the oak trees by the Parks Department yard – where the swimming pool was for forty years. The squirrel was backed up against the main trunk, his tail over his back and face, and was sound asleep. Poor thing was all tuckered out, by golly. We haven’t seen another squirrel yet, but I am sure we will.