I wrote this piece in Dec 2023 as a part of creating my annual winter solstice lino block. Post script added in Dec 2024 with further thoughts on "pest management."
I never knew red squirrels before moving to the north edge of this watershed. They're absolutely small, super skillful climbers, impossibly fast. Very spunky and territorial too, (small dog energy?), different from grey squirrels. From any window on the back of the house, I can watch them zip around the canopy of the sugar maples, run along the deck railing and fly to the spruces - a pleasure to witness! As a tree grower, I admire and relate to them. We're both saving seed, entirely preoccupied with eating now and in the future.
A majority of the trees we grow in the nursery are started from seeds - like the squirrels, this involves us collecting many times our own body weights in seeds every fall and packing them away underground. To keep them dormant through the winter, we store them with moist sawdust in five gallon buckets, big rubbermaid containers, coolers - whatever we can find that does the job. The cellar isn't exactly ideal for seed storage, but it's what we have to work with for now. Perhaps the weakest link is the fact that it is absolutely unreasonable for us to "seal it up" - with a 170 year old stacked stone foundation and a patchwork of ever-more-precarious additions, a wee 6 oz red squirrel has an endless number of welcoming entry points.
And even if the types of seeds we're focused on aren't their primary food source, who can blame them! A dry place packed full of food?? Cameron and I joked when we first moved in that the squirrels happily said to each other -- 'look, they collect nuts too!'
When I tell you that a red squirrel will chew through the hard plastic and insulating foam of an igloo cooler if it's filled with black walnuts, I truly mean it.
Pest control is a part of farming. No one's favorite part. So Cameron set rat traps, and it was really sad.
You want them to know -- it's not that you can't be here, it's that you can't be in the cellar stealing seeds. If you wait a few generations, there will be nuts falling from the sky, everywhere you look, right out there. A forest of hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, pecans, hundreds and hundreds of lifetimes worth.
But that won't come to be if the squirrels eat the nuts before they're planted. And avoidance is a coping mechanism that doesn't suit business owners. We trapped three squirrels in December. The rest of the winter was quiet in the basement. I can bet a new family will move in this year, hopefully by then we'll have built a walk-in cooler to keep the seeds safer. The squirrels can focus on the spruce cones that line the driveway, and we can all live together. (update from December 2024: yes, another family of squirrels moved in, and no, we don't have a walk-in cooler built)
I carved this lino block on the winter solstice with the squirrels on my mind.
"Red squirrel with hazelnut, surrounded by love and white oaks. Present and future combined." Carved on the shortest day of 2023
Amendment from 2024: I thought about 'pest management' all year long. The more I thought about it, the more neutral I felt. It's not good or bad, it just is. Pest management is practicing boundaries. It's not total eradication, it's maintaining your space, and firmly requesting that others do the same. It's respect. In addition to the squirrels, we had loss from eastern cottontails, voles (perhaps our worst offender), and northern flickers. It's easy to get angry. And I imagine they have lots of reasons to be angry too. So - as much as possible, I'm trying to approach 'pest management' from that neutral standpoint. Relationship management.
(and, if you can convince Cameron that getting a dog to keep critters out, and then getting ducks for the dog to guard is actually not the best solution, I'd appreciate it)
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