The denouement of the squirrel saga this afternoon:
I decided this morning to close the damper and prevent the squirrel from coming down into the fireplace. I had a plan: she would most likely be sitting on the damper after some time, and I could open it and she’d fall down into the fireplace. Well, my plan worked — but sadly, she was lethargic and barely seemed to have the strength to move. I picked her up and took her outside, and she simply laid there with her face toward the ground. I placed a bowl of water and some crackers by her head, then picked her up and oriented her so that she could drink — but she didn’t.
The optimistic part of me wants to think that she was stunned from the 1 foot fall into the fireplace. The realistic part of me realizes that when animals are not themselves, it’s rarely a temporary thing. I took her outside my back gate to the grassy area, realizing that if I left her in my backyard, she’d be harassed by my cats and dog. I don’t know how much safer she is outside the yard, and I dread knowing that in all likelihood, she will die there. I don’t know if other people feel such worry about animals as I do; I usually feel that when animals come into the human world and something happens to them, it’s our fault in a way.
I hope that her babies — some or all — survived in the caring hands of the Animal Welfare League.
I had a pretty traumatizing ordeal with a squirrel once. In one of my earlier apartments, I was remarking how strange it was that there was a squirrel walking around on the roof. The squirrel seemed to be looking down off the edge of the roof to the driveway below and running about in between.
I was watching this squirrel, thinking maybe that the squirrel somehow was disoriented and didn’t know how to get off of the roof. To my later horror, I realized that there was another squirrel, a little baby squirrel, laying on the driveway below~ not moving. Squirming slightly but not moving. Had the poor little baby squirrel fallen from the roof? At least 15 foot fall?
I basically freaked out because I was utterly nervous about this poor little squirrel and what I assumed was the baby’s mother or something.
Finally the ‘mother’ squirrel crawled off of the roof and went down to her baby.. and basically took the baby in her mouth and carried her over to the tree that they live in. And I hoped that the baby would be okay. But I had a feeling that s/he wouldn’t be…. 🙁