prefer to listen?
Can a squirrel cast a spell?
Was it so wild an idea to think a squirrel might cast a spell? The thought had come to me on a day when I was particularly tired of the city’s clamor, and in the mood to vicariously consider the powers of a squirrel. I chuckled at the thought. Squirrels, after all, had little else to do but dance along the powerlines and patrol the vast, root-woven territories of their parks.
Why shouldn’t they dabble in sorcery?
Who else could have conjured such an impossible abundance of trees, the sudden eruptions of saplings from cracked sidewalks, the wild, green upwellings in the unlikeliest of places? I imagined them, gray-furred and resolute, burying their caches with the single-mindedness of ancient alchemists, their tiny paws shaping the future forest as they went.
If I owed the endless avenues of urban oaks and the thickets along the riverbanks to any force, it was surely the squirrel’s magic, persistent and small-scale, but world-changing all the same.
This comes from a point of surrender for me. Since my time becoming a birder, squirrels were the bane of my existence.
It really all came down to a kind of cosmic defeat. Only months ago, I would have said, with no trace of irony, that squirrels were the singular ruination of my life. The ruination of my mornings, certainly: every sunrise, what greeted me—without fail—was the violent arrival of the neighborhood squirrels, their vitriolic shrieks and flashing tails, their uncanny capacity for devouring an entire feeder’s worth of black-oil sunflower seeds in mere minutes. I tried everything: baffles, domes, whirligigs, hot sauce and cayenne pepper rubs (which because of an unfortunate slip-up on my part resulted in me sneezing incessantly for 30 minutes),
I had simply been outwitted by a superior intelligence.
The squirrels always won. Not only did they win, they did so with panache, as though the very laws of physics favored their side. How two of them would stage a decoy skirmish at the base of the pole while a third shimmied up the back, body pressed close, invisible to the untrained eye. My broom stick flailing in all directions. Neighbors looking on in disbelief.
I visited reddit posts about people still trying to get the upper hand (to my dismay someone had resorted to shooting at them).
So let me wrap this silly little yarn up.
I realized I was spending more time documenting squirrel behavior than bird species. I was allowing the squirrels to have power over me.
So I gave up. And I began to appreciate the squirrels for the goodness they do in the world.
Bird Lady of Turtle Island 