Squirrels, Love em' or Hate em' at Least They Have Clean Teeth

One of my favorite couples from church asked me a question the other day about squirrels. I get quite a few questions about squirrels. Many of them have to do with how to keep squirrels out of their bird feeders (which I don't have the definitive answer to). But this question related to squirrels chewing their white pine boughs to the point that the branches drop to the ground. Why do squirrels do this? I was stumped since I had never heard of nor observed this behavior. So I said I would do research, which led me to learning a bit more about the mammal that we see most often and don't always appreciate.

Squirrels belong to the order "Rodentia", the largest group of living mammals.
There are over 365 species of squirrels, 3 of which we have in our immediate area; the gray squirrel, the red squirrel and the northern flying squirrel (a few New York counties have the fox squirrel).

Squirrels are quite active this time of the year as it is the beginning of mating season. We see males chasing females, as well as other male competitors. Females will usually only mate with an individual male once over her lifetime. She will gestate for around 60 days and the approximately 4 young are born naked, blind and very small (about 1 inch long) in early spring. They may have another litter in mid-summer if abundant food and decent weather allow.

I have noticed color variation in our most common gray squirrel. In fact they come in shades of gray and brown as well as white and black. The smaller more reclusive red squirrel can also have a black coloration.

Gray squirrels eats nuts, seeds and fruit as well as bird eggs, insects, and if there isn't anything else to be found, road kill. They may also be found by the sides of the road consuming road salt as they need this mineral in their diet.

SOOO...why do squirrels chew my friend's pine branches? They are practicing good dental hygiene! They chew the branches to clean and sharpen their teeth. Not so different from what the Native Americans did to clean their teeth. This behavior can be deadly to squirrels though when they decide to sharpen their teeth on power lines.
They also practice "dodging and weaving" when they are on the road and see a car, hoping to confuse the car into changing direction, which obviously often backfires. Not too smart, but what can we expect from an animal with a brain the size of a walnut?

Squirrels. You may love them or hate them, but they are intersting and fun to watch if you take the time, and don't shun them because they are rodents, they are actually the cleanest rodents of all 1600 types (and opposite of humans, male squirrels spend twice as much time cleaning/grooming themselves as females). Clean bodies and clean teeth, way to go squirrels!

Chimp Attack-Whose Fault Is It?

The story in the news about the pet chimp that attacked a woman got me to thinking. Thinking about how humans do unnatural things and then wonder why bad things happen. I know, who am I to say what is unnatural? I color my hair to get rid of the gray and I wear make-up, both unnatural. But I am talking about behavior more than anything. We behave in ways that are confounding at times. We treat wild animals like our kids or spouses and expect that will make them act like any other part of our family. You can't put a diaper on a chimp, sleep with it, bathe with it, let it brush your hair and then give it human medicine like Xanax and whatever that woman's pet was given for Lyme Disease and assume the animal will somehow "turn" human and behave accordingly. For gosh sakes, humans don't even always act like decent, civilized beings under strange circumstances, why would someone expect a chimpanzee to?

I am an animal lover, I understand the difficulty of separating out human emotion from animal love and care. But when we give human status to non-human animals we begin to cross the line of sanity. Not to say that chimps aren't capable of emotion and thinking, clearly they are. Not to say that other animals aren't intelligent and can learn, clearly they can. But having emotion and thinking and learning abilities doesn't make something human, only Homo sapiens' unique 46 chromosome combination does. And we all know that even humans don't always act human or is it humane? Humans, whether wired wrong, raised wrong, or some combination of, are capable of extreme violence and aggression when provoked (and sometimes when not). Wild animals are even more apt to react at a more base, primal level. I feel sorry for the chimp and the poor woman that got attacked. I feel less sorry for the owner of the chimp (I saw today that she said she wouldn't have done anything differently). Even though she made the mistake of trying to humanize a non-human animal and still seemingly won't admit it was a mistake, I am sure she is at least very sorry that her friend got hurt so badly.

A lesson to remember though. Animals are an important part of our World, but they have a PLACE. A NATURAL PLACE where they belong. That is what we should be putting our efforts into; making sure there is a place for both humans and animals to live naturally, and not get the two so confused that we bring wild animals into our homes and hope for safe integration. We have wild animals here at Tanglewood (injured or imprinted "nonreleasables") that we use as ambassadors to educate people. We use our teaching as an opportunity to tell children never to take a wild animal out of its home. And although we have given many of our animals names (to my chagrin actually), we don't ever forget they are wild and that our job is to take care of them, but remember where they came from and treat them accordingly.

Can we afford nature?

As everyone is, we are thinking about the economy every day at Tanglewood. Not-for-profts in particular worry because we rely on donations to function. When times get tough, something has to go. What people choose to cut out of their lives is personal, yet we always hope that nature and education about our natural world isn't something people think is expendible.

Nature is part of us and we need a healthy planet to survive. It is not something that we can do without like our daily latte or a new purse. You should have learned in your basic biology course that, since humans are animals, we rely on our environment for survival. We need clean air and water, safe food and space. If we are too close (overpopulated) we get stressed, which can lead to all kinds of uncivilized behaviors like murder and other violent acts toward each other. We also have increased diseases and disease-spread as well as increased pollution and resource depletion with overpopulation. All of this can be tempered, even with our growing population, if we are educated.

Nature also gives us something nothing else can- a place to escape. I don't know of a single person (unless you have some specific outdoor phobia) that doesn't just FEEL BETTER when they get outside into real nature. Where things are quiet and slow and look and smell better than our indoor environments. Where other living things are moving about and doing their thing, with no help from us. Hard to believe in our humancentric lives that there are things that go about their every day without needing us at all, but nature doesn't need us. We need nature.

Because we are animals, we need to remember our roots and remember we are a part of this Earth. We can't survive without a healthy Earth. So please don't stop giving to places that preserve nature and teach the community about preservation. Places that work to remind all of us that we can't afford to cut the Earth from our budgets because we will be cutting ourselves out ultimately and that isn't wise.