And Then They Were Gone

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Our dog Vader, patiently waiting for his friend, our house squirrel, to come by. Every day, he lies in front of the sliding glass door and waits patiently.

He doesn’t bark at the squirrels, he just watches them when they’re eating from the dried corncob in the holder underneath our gazebo. We bought it just for the squirrels, after one of them had discovered how to open our bird food container. Which amused us endlessly.

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Is it normal to feed squirrels, a small rodent, so many don’t like? I don’t know, and I don’t care. Our squirrels are part of the house. They live in the old oak tree in front of our home. In the evening, when we watch TV, I can see them chasing each other around the tree trunk. Sometimes, they pause, and it seems like they are looking inside our home — looking at us, the same way we are glancing at them.

Perhaps wishful thinking, but I know for sure the squirrel is aware of the dog’s gaze and mine. When I sit in my workroom on my stool and work on a piece of furniture, or when I cut fabric on the cutting table, I am close to the glass door as well. The squirrel then sits still and watches me. I often wave at it, not sure if a squirrel knows what to make of it, but I continue doing it. I am not a thread, I am one of the hands that feeds the birds and the squirrels, and I hope they know it.

Last winter, when we had so much snow, I placed a plate with squirrel food and nuts on top of the snow. It didn’t even take half an hour, and our visitors were back. They took turns with the blue jay,s and I had to buy more nuts. I didn’t mind, I understood. Being hungry and running out of food is no fun.

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I often joked that the squirrels were our private exercise trainers for our dog Vader, and it seemed that it was a mutual agreement, enjoyed by both parties.

In spring, a squirrel was resting on top of our 6-foot-high wood fence, like it was waiting for Vader to show up, and when he did, the race was on. On top of the fence, the squirrel ran toward the back of our yard, chased by a barking Vader, who ran on the ground, but never with a bad demeanor. It seemed like a game they had, with rules that only animals can understand. The game continued daily.

Then one day, two months ago, hawks came into our neighborhood. They sat in the bushes, quietly, hidden, only to be seen by the trained eye. They waited patiently for the squirrels to show up, and then they snatched them, one by one, and transported them away. In flight, I could hear some of the squirrels cry out for help, and I was overcome by sadness.

The squirrels are not loved by everyone, because if there are too many, yes, they can empty a birdfeeder mercilessly, they might even chew through a cable on their search for food. They multiply, and before you know it, there are more of them.

But they are also very entertaining, and I think they belong in our neighborhoods; they belong in our trees.

Oh, how I wish hawks and squirrels would get along, but sadly, nature has decided that one is food for the other, and while I understand and don’t question nature, I hope the hawks soon will move out, and hopefully, a new family of squirrels will soon fill the old nest in our old oak tree.

If there were an election, I would vote for the squirrels to get their old neighborhood back. I miss them and find our backyard to be rather boring without them, and Vader agrees with me.

Now the corncob feeders are hanging in remembrance of better times and in the hope that soon, another family of squirrels will find the vacant nest in our oak tree.

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