Many years ago a mouse built a nest in one of the heating vents of my car. He lived there peacefully until I went on a climbing trip with friends in the Olympics. We were driving up a steep dirt road to the trailhead, and I turned on the heating to help cool the engine a bit. At some point it got too hot. The mouse jumped out of the vent onto the dashboard of the car to get some fresh air.
It's hard to say who was more surprised: the mouse or the humans. We looked at him in stunned silence. He looked back. Nobody moved for what seemed like about a minute, thought it was probably more like a few seconds. Eventually one of my friends had the presence of mind to grab him and gently drop him out of the window into the bushes at the side of the road.
Then we all laughed hysterically for about 10 minutes. For the rest of the trip you just had to say "the mouse..." and it started all over again. Live well, little mouse!
I have a Prius with solar cells on the roof which power a fan keeping the passenger compartment from getting too stifling while parked in the sun. An adventurous mouse exploring the engine went took a fateful fall and got shredded by that fan. Cost me several hundred dollars to get everything taken apart and cleaned, and I'm sure the tech earned that money.
i worked at a CM-5 facility that had a minor pest problem. i'm pretty sure that like many supercomputers it was cooled by bringing air from underneath the floor and blowing it up through the stack.
the _extremely_ well qualified support personnel had to finally say they weren't going to spend any more days washing rat bits off module boards.
Denver International Airport was built in a very questionable area outside of Denver (there's quite a political story behind that). But one of the unexpected outcomes of this location choice was the interaction between wildlife and the remote parking area.
The yellow sac spider is attracted to the smell of gas. Mazda had to do a recall on its 6 model of sedans (twice!), covering more than 100K cars in North America, because these spiders got into these cars and built webs which blocked vents, affected fuel pressure, and could have even caused fires and explosions (although the recall seems to have prevented these worst-case scenarios).
At least in terms of wildlife, you're not going to escape this. Stapleton was just too small and getting surrounded by city. If you're building a replacement and have access to land, it makes sense to have a lot of it. At 50+ square miles, you're going to have some wildlife interactions almost regardless of where it is.
My uncle had I think it was a Jeep Cherokee or something similar that had to be basically taken apart and reassembled with new wiring because for that model the manufacturer had used a new kind of wire insulation that mice apparently like to eat.
Curious about what routes you climbed! I did Olympus but that was more glacier hopping than technical, I figured most of the technical multipitch was in the North cascades around index. Would love some recommendations as I just moved
It was a trip up the West Fork of the Dosewallips to Mt Anderson (via Eel Glacier). Class three scrambling and glacier travel. Olympic routes are bushwhacks more than anything else.
For real alpinism you want the North Cascades, e.g., Boston Basin/T-Bone Ridge or Mount Washington. Nowadays I mostly do randonee skiing, in which case Rainier, Baker, and Adams are fine destinations with world class descents.
A mouse broke into my garage one winter and decided to use my not often used car as a nest for babies. I happened to use the car one day shortly after they were born (I assume) and let’s just say the shop was grossed out cleaning it all out. There was a stench for a few weeks still after replacing all the air filters and having the vents cleaned.
Squirrels are really interesting critters. I have a funny memory of my then-girlfriend's brother and his wife showing us home video of their trip to America and her family was totally fascinated with the 20 minutes of squirrel footage. At first I didn't understand why anyone, even those in New Zealand (where there are no squirrels), would see squirrels with the same awe one would show on a trip to a zoo, but I thought about it more and realized how weird they are.
For one, they seem to love roughhousing. Everyone has seen videos of squirrels being flung off of bird feeders by anti-squirrel devices, yet they love to come back for more. They'll go through great lengths just to get a single peanut, they're really daring too, but they're not stupid. My parents for a while constructed a squirrel obstacle course in their backyard and at first the squirrels are skeptical; they'll investigate, back off, come back and get a little closer, back off again until they get comfortable and then they figure it out. There's an unused dog-door at my parents' house and I suggested they extend part of their squirrel maze into their house through it. It was such a good idea they actually did it, and the squirrels did indeed come all the way into the house! They must have reasoned at some level that because those maze structures led to peanuts in the past that there could be a peanut inside the house where the maze lead. Of course this also lead birds like scrub jays observing the squirrels and entering the house as well!
For creatures that are relatively vulnerable to predators, they will relax out in the open in really cartoonish ways. It's humorous when they lie on the edge of a fence with their limbs dangling over both sides.
Periodically, my parents have to trim the pods off their palm trees which are quite tall now. Many of those peanuts the squirrels won from the obstacle course ended up at the top of those palms. It almost seems excessive given the amount of energy they seem to expend getting that food.
There are almost no stray dogs and cats in the US to catch the squirrels. In Bulgaria, there strays are common, squirrels are almost out. As a result, family in Bulgaria can grow tomatoes, strawberries and fruit trees in their yard and eat the fruit. In the East Bay Area, anything not fenced in gets eaten by squirrels. They would pick your fruit, eat one bite and drop it on top of your fence. If you have a fruit tree, you’ll see a line of one-bite fruit along the length of the fence neighbouring it.
Here in Bangalore where stray cats are fairly common, you don't see squirrels all that often. Because they mostly get converted to cat food.
A while back I used to feed pigeons at our home roof top. One day I saw while the pigeons were eating the wheat a cat hunted a pigeon. I realised my wheat feed was acting like a bait for cats to hunt pigeons. Stopped feeding them thereafter because I didn't want to be responsible for helping the cat kill the pigeons.
Rat population is less too. But rats are good at hiding below the earth, but I do witness a cat hunting a rat every other week.
Squirrels are really cool. They are human-like in that they have a level of curiosity and derring-do that seems, uh, greater than what you'd imagine evolution would select for.
We have a squirrel in our neighborhood that my wife and kids started leaving nuts out for. Within a few weeks, she would show up at the back door to wait for a handout. Now she has basically no fear of us. She'll take nuts from the kids' hands. She'll come right up to you, which is alarming if you're just trying to leave the house and don't actually have food on you. We have a Dutch door which we tend to leave open, and she's jumped onto the ledge before. It's probably only a matter of time before she comes all the way in the house, the cats notice, and all hell breaks loose.
I'm from Australia and love watching squirrels when abroad. Our closest equivalents might be rats and possums which are mostly hidden away until night and are nowhere near as entertaining. Meanwhile, squirrels muck around constantly in broad daylight where anyone can spectate - they're always up to something.
people like spider-man movies but just go out and watch squirrels.. it's real life super heroes that fit in your hands. these go so fast, fly left and right you barely see them, quite amazing
They are really smart. I once tried to chase one away from a tree using a fishing rod, but it just moved to a distance an inch longer than where the rod could reach and stayed put, just keeping an eye on me while I was there.
There’s a squirrel in my neighborhood who I swear knows the exact length of my dog’s leash and uses the information for some sort of twisted entertainment. Every time we walk out the front door this squirrel dashes across our path juuust out of my dog’s reach. My dog goes nuts thinking that maybe this time he’ll catch that darn squirrel but of course the squirrel and I both know differently. I really think the squirrel gets a kick out of the whole ordeal.
You're right, there's no squirrels in New Zealand! Must be because only birds could fly here, it's too isolated.
This also means that birds are responsible for more incidents here on the cybersecurity parody site CyberSquirrel, which tracks when wildlife brings down computer systems.
Wait is this also true of China? It would explain why I've seen so many chinese tourists filming squirrels all the time. I've always been a bit baffled.
I had a group of Chinese grad students studying my black walnut trees, which was interesting in itself. They literally spent about two hours watching the squirrels go about their business.
I believe that squirrels are much more common in US (and Canadian?) cities than they are in the parks of the big cities of most other countries, which is why they can be so interesting to tourists.
Up until around mid-19th century or so, they were rare in US cities too. If you saw a squirrel in the city it was probably someone's pet. According to a newspaper account from 1856 New York, hundreds of people gathered around a tree that an escaped pet squirrel was spotted in to watch it.
In the later half of the 19th century, there was a popular movement in park design and management in the US that said that making city parks more natural was essential to the health and wellbeing of city dwellers who did not have time to get out of the city. As part of that many cities purposefully released squirrels into their parks.
This is also why you find Eastern gray squirrels in many cities far outside the Eastern gray's native range (which is as you can guess from the name the eastern US). When people wanted to introduce squirrels into, say, Seattle parks they didn't do what you might expect and send someone out to the nearest forest to rustle up some Western gray squirrels to move to the city. No, they had Eastern grays shipped across country and released those in Seattle parks.
The reason for this is that in many areas the native trees are not the kind of trees people like in their parks and so city parks often were largely populated by imported trees from the eastern US. If those imported trees did not produce the kinds of nuts and seeds that the native squirrels like, then native squirrels weren't going to work out in the parks so they brought in squirrels from where the trees came from.
Unfortunately, Eastern grays aren't very picky eaters. They are quite happy eating the nuts and seeds from the native trees and so quickly spread from the parks to the wild and have largely replaced the native Western gray squirrels in Washington. I think the Western grays here are down to just one population.
(The other native squirrels here, Douglas, Red, and Northern flying) weren't affected much by the spread of Eastern grays because they fill sufficiently difference niches in the ecosystem. With Western grays on the other hand Eastern grays are essentially slightly smaller versions of them that like a much bigger variety of nuts and seeds).
I worked with two guys who ran Sheep farms in Australia. Once at the lunch time they saw a couple squirrels (this was in Sri Lanka) and they were really fascinated by them. They said they don't have squirrels in Australia and I was fascinated by that. A quick Google kind of says there are at least a few still left[1] in Australia.
In tangentially related news, I have a huge, 250+ year-old black walnut tree here in Seattle. It bears one walnut a year, and this time a local chipmunk got it before I could. He then carried it up next to my second story deck and tormented me with it while I watched helplessly a roof away.
Tangent from yours: I have a very old pecan tree in my yard that'll easily fill a couple of 5-gallon buckets. More pecans than I could possibly want in a year. I thought this was great when I bought the place.
Instead what I get to do is fill a couple of 5-gallon buckets with green, unripened nuts that the fucking squirrels decided to remove from the tree 2 months before they're ready. Last year I found exactly 0 viable nuts. They were all stripped off the tree before their time.
I just convince myself that their happiness is my happiness. And the shade is still good.
Many years ago during one of the big corporate training events in room of about 80 people we had a little icebreaker activity, where we had to say something interesting about ourselves that nobody else knew. I don't remember what I or anyone else said, except for one lady. She was a high powered account executive or something, but as aside, she said she owned a peach and nut orchard somewhere in California, and she had a big permanently loaded shotgun in her car to "kill the f*cking squirrels" (her exact quote) as she drove through the property because otherwise "they'd get nothing at all".
Great vivid picture and great icebreaker!
Preach! We have lots and lots of blueberry bushes that are apparently here on earth only to feed deer. We've never managed to get a single blueberry. We do get a lot of beautiful deer (and coyotes, and bobcats, and raccoons, and bears).
We also have a black walnut that drops lots of fruit. The previous owner generously left the nut gatherer they used to pick it all up and it made the job super easy. I share this with you now in the spirit of stinky walnut hands.
I've always been curious as to why squirrels have never been domesticated and bred to serve as pets. A wide variety of other rodents (mice, rats, hamsters) are already available as pets, having been domesticated over many generations, and it isn't obvious why no one has ever tried this with squirrels.
Some quick research shows that a big part of the problem is diet: squirrels require a surprisingly complex and varied diet that is hard for pet owners to replicate. Getting them enough physical activity is also an issue.
(Of course, one might suspect that it would be cruel to keep squirrels in such unnatural conditions, but the same could be said of most pets.)
[edit: Apparently keeping wild, undomesticated squirrels as pets was popular at one point (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pet-squirrel-craze ). That article doesn't say why the trend died out, other than...all of the obvious reasons.]
[edit 2: Would a squirrel raised indoors always think it was summer, or would they start storing and then digging up food as the year progressed even with no change in temperature? Might be relevant.]
Haven't all large domesticated pets (i.e. those that can't be kept in a cage) been used for practical purposes for hundreds of years before they became mere pets in modern times? Like cats were used for pest control and dogs for all kinds of workloads.
Domesticating rats takes about 20-30 generations. Squirrels, though, take about 9 months to mature; rats are much faster, less than 2 months, which is probably one of many reasons why we've domesticated rats but not squirrels.
Still, hypothetically, it should be possible to domesticate squirrels within a few decades. In foxes, domestication only took 7 generations, so it could even be faster.
Incidentally, I have a new startup idea: first you domesticate squirrels, then you produce a line of commercially packaged squirrel food and an "invisible fence" type system for "outdoor" squirrels.
I've pretty sure I've got at least 100 peanuts stashed in my garage from a Douglas squirrel that likes to hang around my place. I give her peanuts and for the last month or two she mostly has stashed them instead of eating them right away like she did earlier in the summer. And most of the time she stashes them, she does so somewhere in my garage.
She runs the same general circuit most of the time, going up the left wall, crossing the rafters to the right, stashing the nuts somewhere up there (I haven't yet gotten around to getting a ladder and trying to find out just where she puts them), and then exiting somewhere on the right (she has a couple of different ways she comes down).
As far as I've seen none of the eastern gray squirrels that are more common here use my garage. I've only ever seen them burying peanuts in my yard, or taking them somewhere off my property.
There's a recent survival TV show which had 10 people attempt to live off the land for 100 days in the Canadian far north in the fall and early winter (daytime temps started at 20C and went down to -20C during that time, nights were even colder). A few of the people found squirrels' mushroom stashes and ate them. Several people caught squirrels and ate them as well, but one got very sick and had to be evacuated early.
It was also interesting to see the extent humans would go through to stash the food they had hunted or caught -- for instance, elevated platforms in the trees -- and the determination of animals such as bears, wolverines, and foxes to raid the stashes.
Squirrel can't stop and will not stop. Needs the vault to survive in winter. The man could consider to put a big squirrel box near on a tree from the garden and put all the nuts inside. That would made a nice Christmas history.
Is amazing how many nuts the squirrel has harvested.
Oaks produce huge numbers of acorns about one season every 7 years. My yard had thousands and thousands a few years ago, for example, but very few since. Oaks seem to do this to overwhelm squirrels and ensure that a few acorns manage to germinate. Squirrels that can save acorns for years will do much better than squirrels that can only save enough for each winter.
Similarly, periodical cicadas synchronously emerge in great numbers (more 370 per square meter) every 13th or 17th year.[1] This overwhelms predators and it's thought that the prime-numbered intervals prevent predators from synchronizing their reproductive cycles with that of the cicadas.
Does anyone know what would happen to the squirrel if he/she realizes their entire year's of investment is gone? Does it have feelings to feel angry / sadness?
Would the Squirrel likely starve (or if it was a breadwinner would the whole family starve), or would another squirrel help it out?
If anyone has interesting resources to learn about squirrels that could help me investigate more please share.
Squirrels are known to spy on each other and to steal each other's "investments." (Also, if one notices that another is watching, it will pretend like it's hiding the food here and then take it someplace else.)
Not just other squirrels. I have seen a magpie sitting on a wall waiting for a squirrel to finish burying its nut. Once the squirrel had finished, it descended to have a good poke around the burial area.
The ground squirrels (I see them mostly in South San Jose) live in multigenerational burrows and dont venture too far out. I bet they stumble upon other family members' caches.
Readit News
Many years ago a mouse built a nest in one of the heating vents of my car. He lived there peacefully until I went on a climbing trip with friends in the Olympics. We were driving up a steep dirt road to the trailhead, and I turned on the heating to help cool the engine a bit. At some point it got too hot. The mouse jumped out of the vent onto the dashboard of the car to get some fresh air.
It's hard to say who was more surprised: the mouse or the humans. We looked at him in stunned silence. He looked back. Nobody moved for what seemed like about a minute, thought it was probably more like a few seconds. Eventually one of my friends had the presence of mind to grab him and gently drop him out of the window into the bushes at the side of the road.
Then we all laughed hysterically for about 10 minutes. For the rest of the trip you just had to say "the mouse..." and it started all over again. Live well, little mouse!
I have a Prius with solar cells on the roof which power a fan keeping the passenger compartment from getting too stifling while parked in the sun. An adventurous mouse exploring the engine went took a fateful fall and got shredded by that fan. Cost me several hundred dollars to get everything taken apart and cleaned, and I'm sure the tech earned that money.
the _extremely_ well qualified support personnel had to finally say they weren't going to spend any more days washing rat bits off module boards.
Rabbits. Vehicle wiring. Problems. https://denverite.com/2016/11/02/denver-airport-rabbits-eat-...
Who would ever imagine that their car won't start because a rabbit tested the edibility of some wiring.
This is a widespread problem in Germany, not with rabbits, but with martens. It is especially dangerous when they get a taste for the brake hoses.
At least in terms of wildlife, you're not going to escape this. Stapleton was just too small and getting surrounded by city. If you're building a replacement and have access to land, it makes sense to have a lot of it. At 50+ square miles, you're going to have some wildlife interactions almost regardless of where it is.
Took 6 months to get the thing working again.
For real alpinism you want the North Cascades, e.g., Boston Basin/T-Bone Ridge or Mount Washington. Nowadays I mostly do randonee skiing, in which case Rainier, Baker, and Adams are fine destinations with world class descents.
For one, they seem to love roughhousing. Everyone has seen videos of squirrels being flung off of bird feeders by anti-squirrel devices, yet they love to come back for more. They'll go through great lengths just to get a single peanut, they're really daring too, but they're not stupid. My parents for a while constructed a squirrel obstacle course in their backyard and at first the squirrels are skeptical; they'll investigate, back off, come back and get a little closer, back off again until they get comfortable and then they figure it out. There's an unused dog-door at my parents' house and I suggested they extend part of their squirrel maze into their house through it. It was such a good idea they actually did it, and the squirrels did indeed come all the way into the house! They must have reasoned at some level that because those maze structures led to peanuts in the past that there could be a peanut inside the house where the maze lead. Of course this also lead birds like scrub jays observing the squirrels and entering the house as well!
For creatures that are relatively vulnerable to predators, they will relax out in the open in really cartoonish ways. It's humorous when they lie on the edge of a fence with their limbs dangling over both sides.
Periodically, my parents have to trim the pods off their palm trees which are quite tall now. Many of those peanuts the squirrels won from the obstacle course ended up at the top of those palms. It almost seems excessive given the amount of energy they seem to expend getting that food.
A while back I used to feed pigeons at our home roof top. One day I saw while the pigeons were eating the wheat a cat hunted a pigeon. I realised my wheat feed was acting like a bait for cats to hunt pigeons. Stopped feeding them thereafter because I didn't want to be responsible for helping the cat kill the pigeons.
Rat population is less too. But rats are good at hiding below the earth, but I do witness a cat hunting a rat every other week.
By the way, the squirrels eating just one bite is annoying for you but perhaps better for the sustainability of the tree? (just thinking loud)
We have a squirrel in our neighborhood that my wife and kids started leaving nuts out for. Within a few weeks, she would show up at the back door to wait for a handout. Now she has basically no fear of us. She'll take nuts from the kids' hands. She'll come right up to you, which is alarming if you're just trying to leave the house and don't actually have food on you. We have a Dutch door which we tend to leave open, and she's jumped onto the ledge before. It's probably only a matter of time before she comes all the way in the house, the cats notice, and all hell breaks loose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ1ZYGHmtN8
This also means that birds are responsible for more incidents here on the cybersecurity parody site CyberSquirrel, which tracks when wildlife brings down computer systems.
https://cybersquirrel1.com/
Up until around mid-19th century or so, they were rare in US cities too. If you saw a squirrel in the city it was probably someone's pet. According to a newspaper account from 1856 New York, hundreds of people gathered around a tree that an escaped pet squirrel was spotted in to watch it.
In the later half of the 19th century, there was a popular movement in park design and management in the US that said that making city parks more natural was essential to the health and wellbeing of city dwellers who did not have time to get out of the city. As part of that many cities purposefully released squirrels into their parks.
This is also why you find Eastern gray squirrels in many cities far outside the Eastern gray's native range (which is as you can guess from the name the eastern US). When people wanted to introduce squirrels into, say, Seattle parks they didn't do what you might expect and send someone out to the nearest forest to rustle up some Western gray squirrels to move to the city. No, they had Eastern grays shipped across country and released those in Seattle parks.
The reason for this is that in many areas the native trees are not the kind of trees people like in their parks and so city parks often were largely populated by imported trees from the eastern US. If those imported trees did not produce the kinds of nuts and seeds that the native squirrels like, then native squirrels weren't going to work out in the parks so they brought in squirrels from where the trees came from.
Unfortunately, Eastern grays aren't very picky eaters. They are quite happy eating the nuts and seeds from the native trees and so quickly spread from the parks to the wild and have largely replaced the native Western gray squirrels in Washington. I think the Western grays here are down to just one population.
(The other native squirrels here, Douglas, Red, and Northern flying) weren't affected much by the spread of Eastern grays because they fill sufficiently difference niches in the ecosystem. With Western grays on the other hand Eastern grays are essentially slightly smaller versions of them that like a much bigger variety of nuts and seeds).
What place did they come from that didn't have squirrels? I thought they're native to pretty much any place that isn't Australia or the poles.
[1] https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/pages/a117ced5-9...
Instead what I get to do is fill a couple of 5-gallon buckets with green, unripened nuts that the fucking squirrels decided to remove from the tree 2 months before they're ready. Last year I found exactly 0 viable nuts. They were all stripped off the tree before their time.
I just convince myself that their happiness is my happiness. And the shade is still good.
One would be a pleasure.
https://www.gardenweasel.com/garden-weasel-products/garden-w...
Some quick research shows that a big part of the problem is diet: squirrels require a surprisingly complex and varied diet that is hard for pet owners to replicate. Getting them enough physical activity is also an issue.
(Of course, one might suspect that it would be cruel to keep squirrels in such unnatural conditions, but the same could be said of most pets.)
[edit: Apparently keeping wild, undomesticated squirrels as pets was popular at one point (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pet-squirrel-craze ). That article doesn't say why the trend died out, other than...all of the obvious reasons.]
[edit 2: Would a squirrel raised indoors always think it was summer, or would they start storing and then digging up food as the year progressed even with no change in temperature? Might be relevant.]
Still, hypothetically, it should be possible to domesticate squirrels within a few decades. In foxes, domestication only took 7 generations, so it could even be faster.
Incidentally, I have a new startup idea: first you domesticate squirrels, then you produce a line of commercially packaged squirrel food and an "invisible fence" type system for "outdoor" squirrels.
She runs the same general circuit most of the time, going up the left wall, crossing the rafters to the right, stashing the nuts somewhere up there (I haven't yet gotten around to getting a ladder and trying to find out just where she puts them), and then exiting somewhere on the right (she has a couple of different ways she comes down).
Here she is running her garage circuit:
https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/AIc43WuOR6qbKiadxWGOKw....
As far as I've seen none of the eastern gray squirrels that are more common here use my garage. I've only ever seen them burying peanuts in my yard, or taking them somewhere off my property.
It was also interesting to see the extent humans would go through to stash the food they had hunted or caught -- for instance, elevated platforms in the trees -- and the determination of animals such as bears, wolverines, and foxes to raid the stashes.
I think I read a couple months ago bout an old lady who got dragged out of her tent by a bear and killed because of improperly secured food[1]
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57763443
Is amazing how many nuts the squirrel has harvested.
Oaks produce huge numbers of acorns about one season every 7 years. My yard had thousands and thousands a few years ago, for example, but very few since. Oaks seem to do this to overwhelm squirrels and ensure that a few acorns manage to germinate. Squirrels that can save acorns for years will do much better than squirrels that can only save enough for each winter.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas
Just trying to imagine the angry spousal argument over the nuts in squirrel
Would the Squirrel likely starve (or if it was a breadwinner would the whole family starve), or would another squirrel help it out?
If anyone has interesting resources to learn about squirrels that could help me investigate more please share.
Greys forget, reds probably don't but they are so angry fighting each other most of the time over control of territory including the caches.
>would another squirrel help it out?
They'd eat each other before starving. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/red-squir...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/crypto-trading-hamster-mr-...