When I was a kid we had a trio of baby squirrels that lived in our kitchen. They rode around in the pockets of my mother's cardigan sweater and drank milk from an eyedropper.
When I was a kid we had a trio of baby squirrels that lived in our kitchen. They rode around in the pockets of my mother's cardigan sweater and drank milk from an eyedropper.
Oh wow ! I want to know more! What happened to them in the end? We were so lucky to have raised ours to adulthood, seeing it open its eyes for the first time was amazing! We fed ours with a little eye dropper too!
I was only five at the time, but my mom likes to tell the story so I know it well.
A storm knocked the nest out of a tree and the neighbor's dog chased the momma squirrel away, so my mom scooped up the baby squirrels in a shoe box. When Dad came home from work he insisted on putting the box up in the tree where the nest was so that their mother could take care of them.
That night there was another storm and my mom was wide awake worrying about the babies. Eventually, she talked dad into getting them down. He climbed up the tree during a lightning storm in the middle of the night while wearing his pajamas.
They lived in a box in the kitchen for a few weeks until they got to be too frisky to keep in the house. I remember them crawling out of mom's sweater pockets to sit on her shoulders under her hair. She named them Teeny, Weenie, and Cyril.
We have an old picture of me sitting on the kitchen floor with them. I had rubber bands around my ankles to keep the squirrels from crawling up my pants. One of them did crawl up inside my pant leg, which was a memorable experience.
When a kid has a squirrel in his pants he tends to panic, which startles the squirrel. When a squirrel is startled, he runs up the nearest vertical surface as far as he can go. That is how I ended up with a squirrel in my underpants and I don't care to repeat the experience.
Dad used to work for a nature center where there was a naturalist who took care of orphaned animals. When the squirrels were old enough to fend for themselves, he made a wooden nest box for them and put it in the tree outside his office so that he could keep an eye on them.
They lived in the box for the rest of the summer and then moved on to make their own nests.
That is a pretty good story. I should find those old pictures and turn into a blog post.
Oh wow thank you so much for writing all of that! What an amazing story!! I think I would have done the same thing as your mum and been worrying about the little babies so I am so glad they survived!
Haha no I can't imagine that was the best experience having a squirrel in your trousers! Whenever we held ours we had to wear really thick clothes as his claws were just so sharp! Instead of write the whole story here here is a link incase you are interested, I did 3 parts!
https://steemit.com/life/@vtravels/the-story-of-wilfred-the-squirrel-we-rescued-and-reared-part-2
Its nice that there were 3 of them, for us it was only one so we didn't know the chances of survival for him. Amazing thing to do though!