Terrorist Rodents

Let me introduce you to the Eastern Gray Squirrel. Isn't it cute? Pretty little gray and brown coat, white vest, big fluffy tail. What a busy little thing! Oh, see it scratch. Scratch, scratch, scratch! It's plumb full of mites and it's itchy as hell. Look at that hind foot go! If you could get that thing threaded you could sew up a shirt in ten minutes! Ha ha! A-dorable!

I kid, of course. The Eastern Gray Squirrel needs no introduction, because it's introduced itself every damn where already. Just the fact that it's called an Eastern Gray when it's all the way out here in Oregon lets us know that it's an illegal immigrant, but once you let enough of them in, nobody can do anything about it anymore. The Eastern Gray Squirrel eats nuts, berries, Trail Mix, and bird seed that totally does not belong to them. When it isn't scratching or eating, it's running around like it's coked up and/or making new squirrels, in the absence of any evidence that there is a shortage.

Fun fact about these squirrels! Sometimes they don't eat bird seed that totally doesn't belong to them. Sometimes, instead, they eat all the insulation off your electrical wires, causing your house to burst into flames when you're trying to sleep. Or, as we have recently observed here, they take shelter under your solar panels, and, in a leisurely but thorough manner, strip the insulation off those wires, causing your solar panels to become very expensive squirrel shelters that produce no electricity. Every now and then a squirrel will actually electrocute himself. But not nearly often enough.

Why do squirrels chew on wires? Well, due to a horrible idea on the part of evolution, their teeth keep growing all their lives, and they need to file them down by chewing on your house and other things that totally do not belong to them. There's no good reason they couldn't have designed themselves to allow their teeth to get nubbier and nubbier over time until they become senior squirrels and they can recline in their nests while their kinfolk bring them mushy stuff to gum, but no, they are not interested in such a caring social structure, when they can just hunker under solar panels that totally do not belong to them, and ruin them with their freaky growing teeth. It's a stupid adaptation. It would be like if humans had one leg that never stopped growing and in order to keep from walking in circles all the time they had to go file it down by kicking Eastern Gray Squirrels.

Whatever charm these little rapscallions ever had has worn off for Dave and me long ago, but there's a limit to what we can do about them. Dave does own a Crossman PowerMaster BB rifle that he is perfectly willing to use to dent them up with, but we live in a very deep blue pocket of a blue state and we do not have the emotional fortitude to withstand the wounded looks and earnestly expressed dismay of our neighbors. Short of a stealth advertising campaign to promote Very-Range-Free squirrels as The Other Stringy Meat, our only option is to engage the services of one of our urban coyotes--just once a week, say. It would be bad news for all those neighborhood kitties that like to massacre all our birds that totally do not belong to them, but that's a chance I'm willing to take.

Tossed In Space

So how did the Russian Space Gerbils and their friends fare? Not so good. The space lizards returned in the same nonchalant state they left, although behavioral experts caution that reptiles play things pretty close to the vest anyway, and reliable inferences about their emotional state cannot always be made. As the former caretaker of an iguana, I can attest to this. I enjoyed believing that Sparky was genuinely fond of me, but lizards walk a fine line between affection and thermoregulation. Anyway, half the space mice died, proving the value of seat belts once and for all; and every one of the gerbils appears to have fatally freaked out. From the standpoint of Mongolian gerbil eradication, the mission was deemed 100% successful, and costs are expected to come down over time.

The truth is, whatever gerbils didn't die were slated to be murdered and examined right here on earth anyway. I suspect that the real reason gerbils were sent to space is that there is someone in the Russian space hierarchy who has it in for gerbils, and bad. I can imagine things coming to this extreme because I am living with a man who loses all sense of proportion when it comes to Eastern Gray Squirrels. He hates them. Ignoring his repeatedly-demonstrated historic inability to kill anything (a trait that helps me sleep at night), he keeps threatening to get a gun and create as many squirrel smithereens as he can.

They don't bother me much. I do want to discourage them from hoovering up all my bird seed, and to that end we purchased a splendid Squirrel-Proof Feeder, one that shuts down the feeding holes if something as heavy as a squirrel clambers onto it. I could have opted for the other kind, the one that triggers a catapult and flings the squirrel at warp speed into the stratosphere when he leans on the perching bar, but I visualized endless cleanup of rodent schmutz on my siding and Dave slowly wasting away, unable to peel himself away from the window.

I trace a lot of this animosity to the Corn Nuts And Baggy Shorts Incident of 1994, but the man is capable of making distinctions. He seemed to enjoy the strenuously adorable Abert's squirrel, with its Ears of Exuberance, that we saw in New Mexico. But probably he tolerated the Abert's squirrel because it was in New Mexico, and not here. The reason he hates squirrels is he has an easily stimulated fret center in his brain, and he believes squirrels are devoted to destroying our house. All of them. They want to scurry into our attic and tear

up our insulation, and then they want to dine on our electrical lines. At some certain point in our future, Dave believes, our house will burst into flames as a posse of evil squirrels chuckles from the neighbor's roof. He does not believe his obsession is unreasonable, because he has a reason, and the reason is that this is what all squirrels want to do. Only the vigilance of his fretting has warded off this eventuality so far. If Dave had the money, he would totally blast the squirrels into space. All of them. Even if they're not all Muslims.