Save a squirrel, celebrate humanity

This is the nature of being human.

But you can't very well have squirrels living in the attic.

Well, you could -- but you wouldn't want to. They're rodents, and like other rodents, they tend to messiness.

These squirrels, or more properly the mother, had obviously gone looking for a warm place to nest and found it in the top of one of the walls of the old utility room. The wall was open because a full-size mudroom has been in the process of being built all winter.

Why the mudroom ended up getting built around the utility room is a long story. Suffice it to say that the furnace and the water heater were in that utility room. We couldn't very well move them until we had somewhere to put them. And we couldn't live all winter without heat and hot water.

Well, we could, but we wouldn't want to.

As a result, new construction was forced to progress around old construction.

Exactly when the squirrel entered the picture beats me. It had been in the yard for a week or two and seemed particularly interested in the house. We shooed it out of the garage on at least one occasion.

It seemed simply curious, no more.

We weren't particularly worried.

Hobbs, the West Highland terrier who is what a cat would be if it were a dog, kept the poor thing up a spruce tree most of one day.

Anyway, with three dogs in the house -- one of them a nut-job terrier and another an overactive Labrador retriever -- who was to think a squirrel would be crazy enough to move in.

Not me.

At least not until Tuesday.

That was the day the utility room started coming down, and there was the squirrel, that persistent little devil. One of the cleaners who visit every couple of weeks to try to make the house habitable saw it first outside the utility room.

I chased it out. It came back.

Hobbs got into the act and chased it out.

It came back.

It just didn't want to leave, and I was having a devil of a time darting through a cutout in the wall of the utility room to get into the new mudroom to swing at it with the broom.

So, it being time for the utility room to come down anyway, I decided to rip out the back wall to make things easier.

On only the second or third wall cavity from which insulation was pulled in order to make it possible to kick out the plywood outer wall, the nest was discovered. Or, more accurately, the family was discovered.

Four tiny kittens fell out of the wall, hit the floor and started chattering. They couldn't have been more than a few days old. Their eyes weren't even open yet.

Hobbs immediately wanted to do what any other predatory animal would do -- kill them and eat them.

I have nothing against killing squirrels. Way back when, I used to hunt, kill and eat bunches of big, fat Minnesota gray squirrels. There isn't anything much tastier than an acorn-fed squirrel. If Alaska had squirrels big enough to make a meal, I'd still be eating them.

But those are full-grown critters, and these were, well, babies.

There is, as they say, a time to be born and a time to die. This is the time to be born.

I felt sorry for those baby squirrels squirming on the floor, and for their freaked out mother. Maybe I'm turning into an old softy; maybe I always was, but hid it well.

I scooped the kittens into a pan and took them out into the yard. I thought maybe I could lead the mother down to the woods.

That didn't quite work. First, it was hard to get mom to the kittens. She kept going back to the site of the nest instead of responding to the squealing from the pan, but she eventually caught on.

Unfortunately, she was too fast for me. I'd move away from the pan to give her some room. When she went for it, I went for it, too, but she was in and out with a kitten in her teeth by the scruff of the neck in the blink of an eye.

They ran off toward where some old alders were stacked in piles far from the house. I wasn't sure what to do with the other kittens, but finally decided to put the pan out along her escape route.

She didn't come back for a long time. I know because I sat and watched.

Finally, tired of sitting and watching, I built the kittens a little shelter of scrap wood so the magpies couldn't get at them, and left them on some spruce boughs in that nest. When I came back to check on the situation five or 10 minutes later, mom was back.

I sat and watched her carry the kittens to the alder pile one by one. I hope she found a cozy place for them sheltered from those ravenous magpies and the neighborhood cats that kill for no other reason than that they can.

That is sadly what some animals do. Be not misled by those among us who view the animal world as gentler than the human world.

To any other omnivore, there would have been one word for four squirrel kittens falling out of the sky in front of its nose: lunch.

What sets humans apart is that in such circumstances we feel compassion. It can be a burden. Given my preferences, I'd rather not feel bad about a stupid family of squirrels.

But this is what makes us human.

By the time you read this, I hope the squirrels are safe in a new nest and happy. Or at least as happy as squirrels can get.

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Outdoors editor Craig Medred is an opinion columnist. Reach him at cmedred@adn.com.