LAKE CLARK -- A few days ago, I spied the first robin of the season on the branch of a nearby birch. A good sign. Then I glanced from the tree to my forearm to find a mosquito topping off her tank with my blood.
Gray moths have begun dancing the evening hours away on our windows. I know from last year that this will mean an explosion of caterpillars.
Spring has catapulted into the world again, and not all of the things the season ushers in will be as welcome as songbirds. Already, I anticipate the squirrels ratcheting up their scampering and chatter.
Squirrels, those little devils. It seems like just yesterday they were shredding the cardboard walls of our outhouse, pilfering toilet paper (a whole roll once) and discarded wool socks that Anne and I had been using for rags. Some of the socks they snatched from our open storage shed. Later, we spotted the remnants, with their fluorescent red and orange bands, snagged 25 feet or more up nearby spruce trees.
For the squirrels, items like these are gold mines. Who can blame any critter for filching things that will provide them insulation to pad their nests during the long cold winter?
So I find myself often sympathetic to their cause, and I'm generally amused by their antics. There are, after all, things we can do to protect our property. Now we keep the rags inside and put the toilet paper in a coffee can. Plus -- I'm proud of this one -- I finally got off my duff and finished siding the outhouse. Still, there is that part of me that says, "Hey, wait a minute! That's my stuff."
Many people don't hesitate to shoot them. In fact, there seems to be a kind of homesteader mentality that prefers to pick them off whenever the opportunity presents itself. According to this view, squirrels are varmints. Period. It's true that they can be incredibly destructive. Ask anyone who's had squirrels living in the attic. And there are a lot of them. They're so numerous, in fact, that regular employment of a .22 or .410 seldom decimates the local population.
Just ask my father. He's been sniping squirrels for 35 years now, and they're still keeping him busy. He's diplomatic about it, always dispatching them in Mom's absence. She'd just as soon not hear about it.
Unlike the killing of wolves, which often elicits fierce debate from opposing sides, we don't hear much about squirrels. I know two couples who live adjacent to each other here on Lake Clark in the summer. If squirrels set foot on one side of the property line, they are shot; if they appear on the other, they are fed, sometimes by hand. This doesn't seem to affect the couples' relationship. They're on good terms, frequently dining together but diplomatically avoiding the subject of squirrels. (Though there may be a little grousing behind the scenes that I'm not aware of.)
For a while, one neighbor live-trapped the red rascals and offered them a new island home miles away. But the population in his yard never diminished, and he thought some of them looked suspiciously familiar. So he put a dollop of paint on one before releasing it, and sure enough, a little bright spot of neon came bouncing back into his yard in short order.
Passing judgment on squirrels isn't just a male/female thing. A friend of mine, a well-bred elderly lady who lives on a small lake north of Wasilla, once said to me sternly, "I do shoot them." Red squirrels, that is. Flying squirrels, a rarer and more intriguing species that also live near her, she gives sanctuary. Red squirrels in her area might consider taking flying lessons.
Conversely, another neighbor of mine wouldn't think of killing red squirrels. She watches them outside the window indulging in the sunflower seeds set out for the birds and remarks mildly, "Those squirrels sure are greedy." But she has no such soft tone when she speaks of ground squirrels, which once devastated the marigolds in her flower garden.
Some people with a particularly soft touch would say, "Well, the squirrels have to eat too." But many summers Anne and I have had so many squirrels that they consumed a third of our strawberries. And they're wasteful, sometimes discarding whole berries, or nibbling on green fruits before abandoning them after taking only one bite. My sister-in-law's solution was to plant more strawberries. One trouble with that theory is that there aren't many open patches of ground here, not to mention the work involved in breaking new soil without a rototiller.
The booming squirrel population did bring another visitor once -- a marten. Anne had never seen a marten before, and she wasn't so quick to lay blame on that sleek-looking cousin of a weasel, even when we discovered that it too consumed a fair share of strawberries.
It doesn't seem fair that so often people condemn one species and almost applaud another for the same behavior -- chickadees are invited to the feeder, jays are not. But then, humans are nothing if not inconsistent.
Anne and I do what we can to discourage squirrels, like hang the bird feeder between two trees, or place the swallow houses high on the gable ends of buildings. I'm not sure yet how I feel about the more problematic things like the strawberries. But I know my limit is when the squirrels go after the house. Of course, if I asked a few neighbors what their limit is, they'd probably say, "Oh, about 15 a day."