The Fall of Squirrels

Mon Nov 14, 04:58 PM by Skylab Smith

Tom Waits said it best (but then that goes without saying):

Roadkill has its seasons just like anything,
it’s possums in the autumn, farm cats in the spring.

In northern California this month, however, it is definitely squirrel season. The squirrel in question is the California or western grey squirrel, of the genus Sciurus, derived from the Greek words skia, “shadow,” and oura, “tail.” Sciurus griseus range in weight from 12 to 34 ounces and have a lifespan in the wild of 7 to 8 years, though it is not clear whether these figures take into account the likelihood of the species in question becoming via-mortuus (or however those Latins would say it).

The scale of this phenomenon was recently the subject of study by a small freelance empirical research firm based in Guerneville, CA. In a period of only two hours (what scientists refer to as a “window survey”) the study documented 25 dead grey squirrels on a single 5-mile stretch of rural two-lane road in northern California. One researcher found the results alarming, stating, “If we extrapolate from our findings, there are potentially hundreds of thousands of grey squirrels being run over every minute in California alone.”

Wildlife biologists report that western grey squirrels have very good eyesight even in dim light, and a wide field of vision. They also have well-developed senses of smell and hearing and are universally described as “shy.” It is not clear, then, why so many of them fall victim to the ole’ Goodyear. Our best guess: as these small mammals race to gather the acorns and walnuts that will sustain them through the cold winter months ahead, the hormonal frenzy of the classic scatter-hoarder, combined perhaps with chemical compounds found in the acorns themselves, has led to a sort of temporary dementia. In short, the squirrels have literally gone nuts.

While the typical city dweller might never see any roadkill, aside from perhaps the rare pigeon or rat, for those living in rural settings, roadkill is a fact of life. The inevitability of running animals over when driving country roads was even featured in the David Lynch’s The Straight Story, in a scene where a rural driver, having just hit and killed a deer, laments her fate:

I’ve tried driving with my lights on. I’ve tried sounding my horn. I scream out the window. I roll the window down and bang on the side of the door and play Public Enemy real loud…I have prayed to St. Francis of Assisi…St. Christopher too, what the hell! I have tried everything a person can do and still every week I plow into at least one deer. What is it?

I have hit 13 deer in seven weeks driving down this road mister and I have to drive this road every day 40 miles back and forth to work. I don’t know what to do…I have to drive to work and I have to drive home…

He’s dead.

And I love deer.

Squirrels aren’t the only ones with a harvest going on. In northern California, sticky-fingered hippies and the passage of trailer-trucks are a reminder that our own harvests are being feverishly trimmed and crushed (respectively) right now, too. But if anything, harvest time for people is a time of elevated enjoyment and respect for all life. Northern Californians tend to be sympathetic to animals anyway, to the extent that they are generally conscientious about eating, wearing, or needlessly killing too many of them. Many of these folks would brake and swerve to avoid hitting a frog on a rainy night, though others apply various standards (e.g. avoid cats and raccoons, but possums are OK). Regardless of the size or shape of the thud, hitting an animal tends to pack a load of guilt.

The next emotion is horror. We’ll elaborate. The western grey squirrel’s tail accounts for more than half of its total body length. The Latin name Sciurus suggests that squirrels are noted for the shadow of their tails. The tail reportedly serves many functions, among them: a rudder for jumping and balancing in high places; a warm covering during the winter; a signal to other eastern grey squirrels indicating an individual’s mood; a means to distract a pursuing predator; and an enduring appendage to flaunt in the faces of drivers long after the rest of the animal has been ground into street jerky. A researcher offers this explanation: “Ironically, the grey squirrel can suffer a large amount of damage to its tail, even loosing its tail sheath and a few vertebrae to a predator in order to escape, but the tail doesn’t get hit by cars—the body does.” Once down, the body of a squirrel may be run over repeatedly over a course of days or weeks, but the flamboyant tail floats on every passing breeze, pushed away from tires by air currents preceding oncoming cars, providing a spectacle much like an ill-advised, fluffier version of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey or the remnants of a bizarre ticker-tape parade.

Deer, cats, raccoons, and rabbits somehow manage to get well off the side of the road before collapsing; frogs and snakes get rubbed into the pavement in just a few passes; but squirrels drop in the middle of the road and wave their tails. Vultures don’t even touch them.

Perhaps Northern Californians could benefit from a program like that launched in Louisiana to deal with an overpopulation of a South American swamp rat, the nutria. The 18-pound rodents with razor-sharp teeth and nipples on their backs, brought to LA in the 1930’s by some entrepreneurial fur salespeople, multiplied so quickly in the wild that they began to literally eat the swamp to death. When the demand for rat coats diminished in the 1990’s, civic leaders in LA needed to come up with a new reason to kill the animals—fast—so they promoted nutria cook-offs and lobbied restaurants to put nutria on the menu. A winning recipe features apple-smoked nutria and wild-mushroom crepe in bourbon-pecan sauce.

But it is more complicated than that to eat a western grey squirrel. Killing a grey squirrel requires a permit from the California Department of Fish and Game because they’re classified in California as game animals. Salvaging an already dead squirrel off the side of the road also requires a permit. They’re listed federally as a species of concern. In Washington they’re listed as threatened, which means killing one constitutes a gross misdemeanor and is punishable by fines of $250 to $1,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year. So, depending on where you live it may be legal to kill a grey squirrel either on purpose or by accident, but under no conditions can you eat one unless you have a permit.

For those considering eating squirrel as an act civil disobedience, know that it is reportedly best paired with a good merlot.

None of these bureaucratic hurdles are as horrifying as the actual experience of hitting a grey squirrel, though. Grey squirrels, who spend much of their lives leaping nimbly from branch to branch in the tree canopy, can leap more than four feet in the air in their dying throes. The dying throes can last several very, very long minutes. If you saw the risqué version of Cirque du Soleil in Vegas and thought, “That’s great, only I wish there’d been more blood,” then this might suit you very nicely. Otherwise…not so much.

Roadkill is a phenomenon of the twentieth, and now twenty-first, century. While the horse-drawn buggy likely nipped a small mammal here and there (‘specially after a night of hard drinking) our ability/proclivity to run over animals has increased with every passing year. Our cars have evolved; our wildlife has not. “Like a deer in the headlights,” a phrase most people are familiar with, refers to the blank, seemingly indecisive look on a deer’s face as it stands motionless in the path of an oncoming vehicle. But it’s not indecision—it’s a highly calculated ploy to fool a potential predator. The deer is thinking, “Perhaps that beast hasn’t seen me yet, and if I stand perfectly still—”

Likewise, the grey squirrel that leaps and bounds—faking first left, then right, then left again, with all the agility of a Mexican soccer player and the grace of a Ukrainian ballet dancer—down the middle of your lane is about to prove that evolution is a cruel, cruel master.

A scientific answer, however, does little to soothe the jarred nerves of the roadside motorist-turned-murderer. We are wracked with questions. Why can’t the squirrels learn? Can’t they get a clue from the littered bodies of their fellow squirrels? Why the fuck can’t they just be happy in the forest with their nuts? Why do our paths have to cross? Why now, why here, why me? Are we doomed to repeat mistakes, over and over again? Is our destiny predetermined in some sick way, or do we control our own futures? What is our purpose here, if we can be annihilated in such a senseless moment? What happens when we die? What happens if we turn the mirror toward the void? Does existence precede essence, or the other way around? Is there an objective reality, after all? And if not, what is the point?

Indeed, there are some questions we may never answer.

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