he's cute, but he's a rat

It's that time of year again. The time squirrels become so excited and confused by their nut gathering and burying and digging up and re-burying that they run out into the street, double back to the sidewalk, and then change their tiny minds and dash out into the street again, a la Geico ad.

Scientists do not know why they behave this way, though I suspect they are trying to be run over by cars to reduce their surplus population in some Malthusian plot to better survive the winter as a species.   

In our house, we call squirrels "Rootberry." Why? Because my son renamed them at the age of four, and it stuck. And when you think of it, isn't it true that squirrels are always rooting around, burying their nuts and then digging them up again? (Also, they do eat berries.) 

The word can be plural or singular, a common or proper noun:

"Yikes! There must be a dozen rootberry in Mrs. Van Arsdale's  yard this morning."

"Looks like Rootberry crapped all over the insulation I was saving in the garage and ruined it."

The new next-door neighbors just had to have Wild Animal Guy come out and get a nest of squirrels/rootberry out of their chimney. A couple of years ago, I had him come to get a raccoon out of my attic, and it was actually sort of fun. He set traps around the house and baited them with apples and tuna fish.  Good thing he didn't have to use fox urine (!) like he did at my friend Cheryl's house.

He'd set the traps and go away, then he'd come back every morning to see what we'd caught. We got a couple of possums, which he just let go, and then we caught the neighbor's cat! (We let her go, too.) Finally, we caught the racoon. He was a nasty old male who hissed and spat as he was being taken away to be humanely euthanized, which is what you have to do if a raccoon has decided it wants to live in your house.  They'll keep coming back from miles and miles away if you don't.

Wild Animal Guy generally has animals he's already trapped in his pickup when he comes over, so kids tend to gather when he gets called in. Usually, it's racoons and groundhogs, but once he'd trapped a beaver. It was SO COOL. Its flat tail had the most beautiful cross-hatching. I never would have known.

Since I'm on the topic of beavers, about the same time my son was renaming squirrels rootberry, my other neighbors were having some difficulties with beavers out at their cabin. Seems a colony was basically clear-cutting the trees around their pond. We were in the driveway discussing what one did to remedy such a situation, and my kid was listening. Always an ambitious talker, he decided to jump into the conversation. He said, "You know what the problem is? The problem is, the beaver has no natural creditors."

. . . So all you have to do is INVOICE the beavers, and they'll leave, right?

Olney, Illinois, about a hundred miles south of here, is pretty famous as the "Home of the White Squirrels."  Here's David Attenborough narrating a BBC sequence on the topic. Be very quiet. Many animals come to the watering hole.