[Photo credit to Cary Barnes, March 12, 2018. In the upper right corner you can see a Barred Owl, several other birds, and a squirrel playing in the tall trees.]
The single creature I’ve seen in my yard most often over the years is the lowly Eastern gray squirrel, possibly an occasional Fox squirrel as well, and I admit that I’ve neglected and maligned the cute, fuzzy, curly-tailed clowns most of the time, especially since I’ve become enchanted with my Barred Owls.
The U.S. has more than four times the gray squirrel population of any other country—forty to fifty million by estimation, according to the World Population Survey. I’m not kidding—you can Google that for yourself. Tennessee and Memphis in particular have no exact, or even ballpark figures, either. They move around too fast, are too hard to tell apart, and discourage even the most devoted naturalist from taking on the thankless task of trying to count them. Suffice it to say, there are lots.
Squirrels in general aren’t popular around human homes because they’re known, like raccoons, to get in people’s attics, chew on electrical wires, and even start fires—unwittingly, I’ll give them that. On the outside, they make it their mission to eat the food that we put out for birds. Men in particular seem to become obsessed with ongoing battles to keep squirrels from their feeders, but the squirrels I’ve known about always outwit human engineering eventually, if not at first. Women can get sucked into this futile endeavor, as well, but most of us can find better things to do.
Squirrels might sometimes be persuaded to relocate if given the incentive. Our friends from New Jersey trapped and marked the squirrels in their yard by spray-painting their tails orange to see if they would return after being dropped off across town. They didn’t, but their friends told them a year later, “We saw the oddest squirrels in the city park. They had orange tails!’
My friend, writer Dee Allen-Kirkhouse, has written a series of beautiful articles about the lives of the squirrels on her California property. Check out her Substack to learn the details of their life cycle and behavior. The main thing I’ve observed is that they nest, play, and compete in my backyard year-round, and they do a pretty good job of entertaining my dogs.
I’ve had several dogs in this house: perky Springer Spaniels, a docile Golden Retriever, a Blue Heeler (aka Australian Cattle Dog) mix who turned out to be 2/5 American Pit Bull, my son’s dogs, and now my 95% Blue Heeler Charlie, also part Australian Shepherd, we think. I’ll be sending off his DNA kit as soon as I can get around to it, which will require both of us to be in the mood.
I don’t remember any scary events caused by my squirrels, but my late husband Cary was one of those determined bird-feeding men mentioned above, as was my dad. Cary tried many different “squirrel-proof” feeders, strung wire lines between trees and the house with greased metal baffles on either side of several feeders, and attempted various placement strategies. The grease didn’t last long on the baffles and it would have been a pain to take down the wire lines to add more grease.
It only led to more trouble. Late one night, he called me out of bed to witness a fascinating—to him—row of six baby roof rats hanging by their little “hands” from the new-ish feeder line that began at our upper deck. The “See Rock City” imitation barn feeder that Cary loved, because of his East Tennessee roots, was just beyond the baffle, tempting them away from their mother’s nest, which was probably tucked under the deck or in the skirting of the hot tub we had at the time.
One reason Cary may have had it in for the squirrels is that his dad once took him on a trip to East Tennessee to hunt the red squirrels that inhabit that end of the state. They didn’t bag a single one, but when they got back to Memphis and pulled into their driveway, their cat had neatly laid out three of our hometown variety in the garage.
It’s funny when they chase each other around the trees in a barber pole pattern, run up a tree trunk hidden behind a sprig of leaves to put in a nest, or practically fly from tree branch to tree branch as if weightless. The smaller versions, their young, like to play tag in groups of two, three, or more.
Of all my dogs, Lucy was by far the champ, at least so far. She knew the word “squirrel” as well as the dogs on TV commercials and would shoot out after them if we opened the kitchen door. It was good exercise for her. She also came to attention at the word “cat” but never got hold of one.
A frequent predator of moles, voles, and mice, she wanted like no man’s business to go after the squirrels on our daily walks and didn’t mind pulling hard, until she finally admitted to herself that I was right when I said, “They’re just going to go up that tree!” As she got older, she got wiser, at least in that regard.
It may have been five or six years ago when Lucy caught her first and only squirrel. She had never come very close, as far as I knew, but on this one day we headed out through the breezeway and she got lucky. She began her chase around the azalea bushes, cut off a squirrel on its path toward the tree, and nabbed it. I have to interpolate there, but that’s what had to have happened. She cut it off like any good cattle dog. The only thing I saw was a squirrel shooting straight up into the air about eight feet and coming back down. By the time I got to her in the middle of the backyard, she had a dot of blood on her nose, it had given up the ghost, and she didn’t want to share it.
My only choice was to head back to the house, knowing she would follow me with it, and close the door, quickly turn off the electronic dog door, and let her get tired of it. It wasn’t long before she had laid it gently on the outside sill of the dog door, full-length and dignified.
The Barred Owls have always had an interesting relationship with the squirrels. If the squirrels nest in the hollow, the owls will run them off, if they don’t eat them first. I can’t see inside the hollow unless I decide to climb a twenty-foot ladder, and that will never happen at this point in my life, with my bones getting more brittle every day. I’ve never known exactly what happens inside the hollow. I like to keep that part a mystery.
When the chicks hatch each year, a squirrel or two usually pesters them, one at a time, and the parent owls come to their aid if they seem to need it. They face off—squirrel face to owl face—and usually the squirrel backs down. I’ve never seen an owl catch and eat a squirrel, but Cary once told me that the breakfast the dad brought to his brood that day was entirely squirrel meat.
That brings me to the subject of human consumption of squirrels. Long ago, it seems like in another world, my grandfather (a retired Superintendent of Schools who, I thought, had always been a professional hunter and fisherman) would bring home deer, rabbits, squirrels, ducks, all kinds of fish, and even on occasion a frog, for dinner. He’d had to learn to hunt and fish as a teenager in central Arkansas when his father left his mother and his five siblings for another woman. He was the oldest, so it became his job to provide, even while he went on to college.
PawPaw, as we called him, would also forage for buckets of blackberries and huckleberries in the summer. My grandmother loved to make jam and pies with them, but at some point laid down the law and said she would only cook the game and fish if he cleaned them first.
So, as a child, I had squirrel for dinner, probably several times. They lived about ninety miles away, so I can only remember one time. I thought it tasted good, mostly like chicken legs but smaller. She never cooked frog legs. He had played a joke on her once, telling her a frog he’d cooked was “water squirrel,” and she had never gotten over it. If my cousins read this and want to chime in, please do so in the comments below.
I’m sure they’ll all agree that Mimi, as we called her, was one of the best cooks I’ve ever known. Her huckleberry cobblers were among those elusive delicacies I can never conjure into reality in my own kitchen, no matter how hard I try. They don’t make grandmothers like they used to.
