Nest Building

On my walk this morning, I kept hearing rustling on the island, and finally realized that a fox squirrel was hard at work, building a nest in the cleft of a tree. I only meant to watch for a second, but got so entranced that I lost track of time. What a production! Unlike birds, who mostly pick up loose stuff and just fly off with it, the squirrel was wobbling out the the end of branches, gnawing off twiggy tips and hauling them back. And, of course, on the way back, there are twigs poking out in all directions that cause you to get hung up on things, so then you have to turn around and tug and tug. And if that doesn't work, you have to go back and gnaw some more. Sometimes the limb is so unwieldy that it's just easier to climb down to the ground, turn around and ascend again rather than trying to turn around mid-trunk.

Then, after all this work, you get the branch back to the aforementioned cleft, where you have been hard at work laying out a few base sticks as a platform. Shoving the new stick into place frequently dislodges other sticks that you've worked so hard to wedge in, and all your bouncing up and down on the sketchy platform doesn't help. This assumes that you even manage to get your newest stick in place - about two-thirds of the time you drop it and start all over again.

As if all this weren't bad enough, the birds were tremendously loud today, and in his behalf, I wanted to tell them to just shut up! There was a squabble amongst goose neighbors, and the seagulls were so bad that listening to Rush Limbaugh would have been preferable. (Actually, that's a very apt analogy - lots of angry squawking, very little substance, and poohing all over everyone else's existence without making any real contribution.) It's warmer, and the ice is thinning, and I think some of it was just self-encouraging chatter to keep up one's nerve while tiptoeing on the ice, but still - what racket! Personally, I also wanted to suggest that he reconsider the advisability of having geese as neighbors. It has to be like living next to an Appalachian trailer park when it's perpetually Friday and perpetually payday.

Anyway, I'm not sure what the squirrel phrase for "Damn" is, but I think it looks like this:


This is what my new friend did after several attempts at stick placement. On the one hand, he looked tired, but on the other, he looked for all the world like he was thinking very hard about the advisability of the whole process. In fact, I think he seemed to be questioning being a squirrel at all - seems like it might be easier to just go live in an abandoned hole or something. After a few minutes, he climbed down from his tree and went to rest in a leaf pile. I empathize - it's a terrible thing to be driven by instinct and training to do something that is so frustrating. Perhaps he needs a squirrel therapist to discuss his tragic upbringing with parents who taught him to base his self-worth on the quality of the nest he constructs. Will have to go check on his progress this weekend and hope he does not have a breakdown in the intervening days.