Saturday afternoon, I’m planting shrubs in my back yard and listening to MPR. There’s story about the Star Tribune’s recent contract negotiations with the Newspaper Guild.

Something lands on my shirt. I stop shoveling. I look down, then I look up. Little bits of yellowed newspaper are snowing all over my yard.

Suddenly, there is a terrible, high-pitched scream. I turn towards the sound just as two tiny pink bodies hit the ground.

I put down my shovel and run to the base of my Colorado spruce. I bend down and find myself face to face with the progeny of my garden antagonists. Blind and hairless, it was raining baby squirrels!

They started to cry and I started to panic. I made a little nest out of some dried leaves, then gently arranged the squirrels inside. There was a tiny scratch on one, but both seemed to survive the fall. They curled around each other and stopped crying.

As I watched their tiny bodies breathing, my heart softened just a bit. The squirrels looked my cats when they sleep together in a big pile on the couch. It was only a matter of months before these troublemakers would be attacking my tomatoes, but for now, I was taken aback by their vulnerability.

The BF joined me in the back yard and we made a better nest in an old planting box to protect the squirrels from the neighborhood raccoons. Hopefully, the mother will come back soon. Keep you fingers crossed!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 25th, 2009 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Critters + vermin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.