Many readers commented about squirrels being agile cute and fast. Many people enjoy watching them as when they run trough the tree branches as if it was magic. Red squirrels are agile and seem to make those impossible moves look easy.
Well, I hate to rain on your party. Squirrels may be lightening quick and agile but they do have accidents.
Scientists studying squirrels find squirrel bodies that have broken bones. So apparently squirrels fall from heights that cause broken bones. Now I know you've never seen a squirrel fall but I have. I've seen a couple of spectacular crashes.
These crashes were so great that I told my classes the squirrel story for many years.
Now I called my story The Retarded Squirrel. Yes I know retarded is not an acceptable term.
So it goes like this. I have a long fence that has a 2 x 4 for a top. In other words the top of this fence is 4 inches wide. There was a squirrel in the area that would fall off the top of the fence. If it had happened once I wouldn't have made an issue out of it. But I did notice this squirrel fall off the top of the fence quite a few times.
Now the second incident with my retarded squirrel was more interesting to watch. There were trees on each side of an alley that stuck out over the alley. The squirrel wanted to cross the alley by leaping from one tree to the other. This squirrel took a lot of time to consider the jump. It ran up and down and around the tree to find the best place to leap from one tree to the other tree on the other side. Finally, a choice was made and you could see the squirrel saying one, two, three jump! Well the squirrel did not make it to the other tree across the alley. The squirrel fell about 3 meters into some soft snow. The squirrel shook itself and looked around as if to say, "What am I doing here?" Then it picked itself up and waded through the snow to a tree.
This was a story the kids loved and many years later I was asked if I still had my squirrel.
A sad note on my last post. This afternoon I found a squirrel that had been run over on the road. So one less competitor in this world.
