The
Our ramshackle summer home was in
those woods and it was made of wood. Like the surrounding, dripping forest, it
just sat on the granite with no foundations and slowly rotted away around us.
We put up bird-feeders, not expecting
much to come beneath the misty-grey shade of the pines, but within minutes we
had attracted a hummingbird and a sparrow. However it wasn’t long before the
vandals arrived in the form of chipmunks and grey squirrels, making it
impossible to maintain the feeders in the day time, so we filled them up at
dusk. All the same, they were empty by morning.
We drove around after sunset,
weaving about so that our headlights searched the woods for glowing eyes. White-tailed
deer, foxes, raccoons and skunks became regulars. We screeched to a halt to
watch a bear in a roadside pine, but he turned out to be a satellite-dish that
served another cabin that was lost in the woods. Finally we saw a porcupine
climbing a tree, but he seemed too ungainly to be our seed-stealer.
At the local gun store, I bought a
bright, red and white LED head-torch, designed for tracking blood-stains. The
idea behind this is that, if you shoot an intruder with a crossbow or a hand
gun, you can track him down as he limps off into the blackness. Dialling 911
isn’t the way they do things in this part of Maine !
I took my coffee and camera out to
the deck and sat near the feeders, using my white light to scan the tall trees until
I saw something up there, but what? The head-light wasn’t helping so I turned
it off, along with all the lights in the house.
As I waited for my night-vision to
improve, I became aware of feverish gremlin-like activity very close-by. It
sounded like about a hundred cartoon chipmunks running round a tree and having
a party. If this was Africa , I’d have said we
had bush-babies in the yard but I saw some white arrow-shapes flash
horizontally by. Were they birds then?
I waited until I was sure that these
critters were on the feeders before turning on my red light. Everything stopped,
and the thieves knew they were nabbed, red-handed. They froze as if to say “Uh-oh”, and their guilty, beady, black-button
eyes almost popped out of their cute little heads.
Imagine six hyperactive creatures
the size of chipmunks but with tails like squirrels and the face, fur and
colour of edible dormice; soft chinchilla-grey on top and spotless white
underneath. These incredibly clean, lean, fluffy rodents were stealing several pounds
of bird-food a night. It seemed impossible. But what were they?
I looked through the Peterson field
guide and decided on Northern flying squirrels, and so these enigmatic,
nocturnal creatures became my obsession for the next week. They turned out to
be not at all shy; they just totally shunned the light. A person without a
light could stand inches away from them and they would continue to steal food
all the time, but surely they couldn’t eat all that seed in one night?
Actually they hide it for later,
just like chipmunks or hamsters they fill their pouches with food to carry it
off and hide it for use in the long New England
winter. I could see them doing it.
Can flying squirrels really fly?
They don’t have wings, just a hankie shaped flap between their legs on each
side, but perhaps they waggle their tails to add impetus? What I saw mostly was
a J shaped trajectory where they accelerated downwards, flattened out and then
flew to a lower point on an adjacent tree; always head-up. Nine times out of
ten I only caught the latter part of their flight so I saw them ‘flying’
horizontally then upwards, giving the impression of true flight.
You can find flying squirrels in
forests all over New England , despite the
locals telling you they aren’t there.
This essay was written for a competition. It didn't win but I'm pleased with it.
