August 15, 2014

Thank you, mail carrier, who braved Terrier of Record’s furious barking to let me know a squirrel’s nest had blown down in this afternoon’s rainstorm. Its occupants were on the ground, chilled, no parent squirrel to be seen. Now, after some Pedialyte and some time on a heating pad under some towels, they’re napping. Hope they make it through the night, and that I do (they need to be fed every two hours).

August 16

Update: waiting to hear from rehab expert. I’m feeling slightly sleep-deprived but the squirrel triplets made it through the dark hours. I’m guessing maybe 10 days old (going by web descriptions). SO TINY.

August 18

Squirrel report, day 3: Getting attached. Tiny silky black whiskers. Finest down on heads and tails. Worst of all: they’re starting to chirp when they want something. Good thing I don’t believe in having wild animals as house pets (at least not in a house with four ravenous blazing-eyed cats). Oh, babies, babies, you make us love you.

August 19

How do people do this? I need more continuous sleep than an hour and a half at a time. How do new parents do it? How do real animal rehabilitators do it? My hat is off, forever, to all of you.

August 19

Last squirrel update.

I found a squirrel rehabilitator–a licensed someone, who doesn’t have predatious cats and dogs sniffing under the nursery door–and I dropped off the triplets with her this evening.

I miss them. I’m worried about them. Is it too soon to call and check up? Should I ask her if she needs goat’s milk for them?

I should relax. She’s a rehabilitator, for pete’s sake.

So here are some things I’ve learned about squirrel infancy.

The physical changes are astonishing. I don’t have a scale, so I didn’t weigh them, but they grew heavier in my hand over the four days I had them, like warm stones. They had the slightest fuzz on Friday. Today the down was thick as velvet. You know how, if you spill a drop of water on velvet, it sometimes won’t soak in but instead rolls across the tops of the individual fibers? That’s how liquid behaves on the stuff they’re covered with. Their little fingers are longer. Nails are darker. They have actual hairs, in addition to the down, on the backs of their heads and tips of their tails.

They talk. I heard grunts of contentment, inquisitive chirps, and one loud squeak of objection when I picked one up too fast and scared it.

Their metabolisms are so unformed they can’t generate their own heat. When one begins to feel cool, the advice is to hold it next to your own skin till it warms up again. I now have a “squirrel spot” at the base of my throat.

They can’t eliminate on their own. You encourage them to do it by wiping their genitals gently with a damp washcloth. You do this as long as it takes for them to pee and poo, for if they don’t they can die.

They do a weird sibling-suckling thing that can be very bad. I overslept by an hour on Saturday night and fed them after three and a half hours instead of two and a half. I saw that one of the boys’ urethras was bright pink and his penis looked irritated. Apparently his brother or sister, being hungry, tried to suckle him. If a baby squirrel ingests urine while doing this it can poison itself. I used a dab of Neosporin on the suckled one and did not oversleep again.

Their default position is curled up nose to tail, inconspicuous. Tiny like a walnut. Sometimes they hold their feet with their hands, like they’re about to do a cannonball into a pool.

They usually aren’t weaned by their parents until they’re twelve weeks old. Older than puppies.

Now they’re not here, and the bathroom door can stay open. So long, little rainstorm-blown wigglers.

NASHVILLE. In fact, there are black widow spiders here. They tend toward introversion and will not become aggressive unless they, or their egg sacs, are threatened. The spider I found by the (struggling, heat-blasted) Nymphenburg rose last summer hung in its random and cloudlike web with two front legs loosely curled around its white egg sac, which was about the same diameter as the spider’s drop-of-asphalt abdomen. She resembled a protective human parent surrounding a newly-upright toddler with outstretched arms–not touching, just shielding at a short distance.

I killed her. The egg sac contained hundreds of juvenile black widows. Cats love spiders: to chase, to toy with, eventually to eat, or at least to sample.

The hobo spider is a friendly sort, but poisonous. Most are European imports although American hobos may be found in the northwest. Chevrons adorn its abdomen, and its long legs occasionally have horizontal stripes; perhaps it’s wreaking Malvolio’s revenge in the new world with its gaudy sartory. The wolf spider stalks and pounces upon its prey, and can inflict a painful but not poisonous bite. It too is a fiercely protective parent. House-spiders prey on mosquitoes and are hard to provoke. Garden spiders, or argiope aurantia, create spectacularly large orb-shaped webs and are helpful garden predators. Jumping spiders, tiny and compact as a welter-weight boxers, leap straight up, often rising to relatively great heights, especially when agitated.

The common housefly’s (musca domestica’s) gymnastic abilities include lighting upside-down on horizontal planar surfaces via a quick half-roll to aim its sticky (and dirty) feet upward. The family comprising blow-fly species (calliphoridae spp.) are actually related to the mosquito, which is also of the order diptera, or true (two-winged) flies. The true blue-bottle, which lays its eggs in rotting meat, is called Calliphora vomitoria.The green-bottle is Lucillia caesar, a name that may, if you want to be contrary, be translated as “Light king.” Species of flies as as numerous as their habits and behaviors: “…Thats why these flies are weird they dont seem intersted in the mess, …they are only interested in the ceiling fans and ceiling lights(even when the lights are off) they circle and fly around the pull chains and the globes almost in a swarm like fasion….WHAT THE HECK IS UP WITH THESE FLIES!!!…” (www,getridofthings.com).

Musca domestica, our house-fly, has been characterized as, among other things, a “well-known cosmopolitan pest” (http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/urban/flies/house_fly.htm), “medically harmless” (http://insects.tamu.edu/fieldguide/cimg237.html), a “prolific breeder[ ]” (http://www.getridofthings.com/get-rid-of-house-flies.htm), and “not native American[ ]” (http://www.hydeparkmedia.com/housefly.html). Moreover, “their feet are filthy” (ibid.).

The narrator of Musca domestica, Christine Hume’s first published book of poetry, calls the collection a “flypaper palimpsest.” “Highway Address” is the second poem in the book.

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Highway Address

And yet we thought our presence changed it: the sod we laid in tiers like bricks and the birds our dogs planted at stick crosses as the passing lights wore holes in our couches and faces. We were something to look at. We watched their cycle shut around us. We named where they were going—fuming as they were to get there—to the great invisible fortresses and lifetimes of coming to the kingdom, kingdom come. Very well, the mind is a patient animal waiting for dark to jump the fence like the hitchhiker we would have picked up. but we are a house. He was tinged with the baseness of darkening blue. The sun behind him cranked bolts of ancient nerve and laughter. Falling rocks are a hitchhiker’s hazard, though some say the rock is only happy when hitting home. So it was with us. Lightening yellowed our teeth like the road’s wishing-line. Speed organized our air, a force on a field that had not forgotten the forest. It had pull with us.

–Christine Hume, Musca Domestica (Beacon Press, 2000)

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