The scurrying sounds coming from the attic finally become too much, so I order a motion-activated “trail camera” for $30, ascend into the cold, dark attic and point it toward the corner where we sometimes hear noises in the dead of night.
Sure enough, when I retrieve the SD card and slide it into the slot on my computer, it shows dozens of 10-second video clips, each with a corresponding JPEG image.
And then there they are, big, glowy eyes, straight, short, fuzzy tails, big folds of skin tucked away beneath their legs…. Flying squirrels.
The images and videos further reveal a screen that has come unattached in the lower corner of a window, several squirrels nudging little noses up under the edge, lifting it enough to squeeze through and out, then pushing up against it with their heads to gain reentry.
The most I ever see in one shot are five of them. They certainly seem calm, happy in their dry, safe space, scampering up and down the walls, jumping from old bed frame, to plastic box, to children’s bookshelves, then disappearing into folds of insulation.
I read that flying squirrels will give up their solitary existences to den in small groups in the winter, hunkering down together to fend off the cold and better their chances of survival, venturing out on warmer days to forage for food. They will mate in these dens in the late winter, and come spring, they and their offspring will return to their independent forest lives, flying through the darkness from limb to limb.
They are not like their cousins, the grey squirrel, who will relentlessly chew and destroy and wreak havoc in any attic they gain access to. We have played that game, when one found its way in through some rotted wood beneath a failing gutter. Before replacing the gutter, we hired a wildlife control service. This was at the height of COVID. The man came with an armful of traps, attaching them to the side of the house near the hole, baited with a handful of peanuts in their shells. With the gutter removed, I could see the hole was wide, large, inviting. He trapped one big grey female and told us she was pregnant, so we had called him just in time. He was also concerned that he had trapped a flying squirrel as well. They are wily, harder to trap and tend to use more than one entry point—and where there’s one, there are always more. He had a brazen, wild look in his eyes, and for a moment reminded me of the exterminator character Christopher Walken plays in the film Mouse Hunt. He found several other holes (but never the un-attached screen), screwed narrow cage traps directly over them, long, protruding outward, but then never returned, never answered my calls (had COVID claimed him?). No grey or flying squirrels appeared again in any of his traps. We removed them, repaired the holes, installed new gutters, were saddened by the possible fate of the squirrel catcher, and forgot about squirrels.
I call a woman whose son attended the same daycare as our children because I vaguely remember she works in the field of wildlife rescue. It takes some time to help her remember who I am; it has been so many years. But in the end she tells me the thing I suspect from what the Internet has been saying. Trapping and relocating them will essentially kill them. They wouldn’t be able to find a new den. They would become the prey of hawks and eagles, foxes, coyotes, and perish.
I re-survey the scene in the light of day, the flying squirrels ensconced somewhere beneath layers of insulation. They have surely left their mark, patches of droppings here and there, some insulation pulled up in a far, low corner, but nothing chewed, nothing destroyed, nothing permanently damaged.
I watch some videos of flying squirrels soaring from tree to tree, their four feet spread wide, stretching those big flaps of skin outward, transforming them into fantastic wings. I think of the flying fish I’ve seen zipping along in a small panga on the Yucatan’s northern shore in search of giant tarpon, fly rod at the ready, how they erupt from the edges of the boat’s wake, their fins transfigured into wild-spinning wings as they lift a foot or two above the surface and, at least for a handful of seconds, stop being fish and become something altogether new.
These tiny, big-eyed creatures experience something akin to that, letting go of a limb, using that straight tail to rudder-steer them as they fall-fly-glide toward another tree hundreds of yards away. Unlike flying fish, they can sometimes catch a current of wind and hover even, more bird-like than ever, tilting their heads, using those enormous night-vision-eyes of their own to help find, triangulate their way toward a safe landing spot.
And so I’m left with this moral dilemma. How fiercely should I draw the line between my human, un-wild, tamed existence and that of these wild, remarkably-evolved mammals?
If I do nothing now, come the first days of spring, they and their babies will leave, and I could then reposition my camera for several nights to verify their departure, secure the screen, pull shut the cracked-open window, clean up their den, search for and close off other points of entry, hoping that come next late fall they will be able to find as good a place to winter over….
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Squirrel-cam! I like it. We have plenty of grey squirrels in our garden and thank heavens they’ve never found their way into our attic. Thankfully in England, maybe because our houses are rendered or brick built, we don’t tend to get creatures inside, other than spiders. But I always try to remind myself that they were here first, usually, and it’s ok to share space. They don’t make a noise though!