Squirrel angst...

I nailed a squirrel with the car today. It’s been a while since I’ve collided with any living thing larger than a butterfly. You’d think, being a gardener, that offing one of the fuzzy felons would be cause for a minor celebration. Not necessarily a whooping, frenzied war-dance, scalp-it-and-tack-it-to-the-barn frolic, but at least a sip of martini, nod of the head, fare-thee-well.

I have mixed feelings.

Squirrels are, after all, rats in haute couture. Only slightly less despised than their city cousins, these bushy-tailed rodents occupy a different social strata if only because they are more arboreal. In the gardening world, they are definitely a bigger problem. My victim had, more than likely, led a life of crime, pilfering carefully planted bulbs, digging seed from the garden, nipping new growth in a fashion that can’t exactly be regarded as pruning, filching food from feeders, and dropping tulip tree flowers like tennis balls on my roof from the crack of dawn until nightfall virtually eliminating long, languid mornings and afternoon naps at a time of year when they are most needed.

On the other hand squirrels, like the debonair crooks of Oceans 11 (12, 13 ……), are lovable--character flaws aside. They are entertaining to watch, humorous and acrobatic. They walk wires; vault from branch tip to impossible branch tip (I’ve only seen them miss twice—what a hoot!); drop through the air more than 10 feet to glom onto hanging feeders; and race, spirally, up and down tree trunks in a dizzying display of dexterity.

Squirrels are far more intelligent then their tiny brains should enable them to be. And, truth be told, matching wits with them is one of the more cerebral exercises any gardener will undertake. Anyone who’s done battle will tell you that they have a pretty high quotient of problem-solving in their makeup.

They too are gardeners, and although we don’t always like where they plant, the hundreds of nuts they busily bury are never all recovered and help the oaks and other mast producers regenerate. I just wish they’d keep them out of my pots.

On the grand scale of living things, squirrels are pretty high up. They’re visible (for starters), sentient, and fellow mammals…closer to us in biological terms than, say, a frog or a grasshopper.

Oh yes, they also provide sustenance for running, flying, and slithering predators—and someone’s going hungry tonight because I ran over dinner.

Sorry.

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