A close encounter of the squirrelly kind

Early last week, Liz and I discovered that we had a squirrel in the house. Well, not in the house, exactly, but in the attached shed and the wall of the adjacent mud room.

The first sign was the telltale patter of little feet behind the paneling in the mud room. That wasn’t reason enough to conclude that our uninvited guest was a squirrel, but when it stuck its head out onto the deck one day while I was sitting out there with the dogs, we had a positive ID: Tamiasciurus hudsonicus, aka the American red squirrel.

With four house cats, I wasn’t worried that the squirrel would get very far if it was foolish enough to venture into our living quarters. After all, I once found a decapitated gray squirrel in the backyard, no doubt the victim of an encounter with one of the neighborhood cats. (Our four musketeers stay indoors.) Still, getting rid of the squirrel without relying on kitty assassins became a priority. What to do?

The local animal shelter did not lend out Havahart traps, and the pet-supply store did not sell them. Enter the city’s animal-control officer, who loaned me a trap, with verbal instructions, the last of which was a bit disconcerting. “If you trap a squirrel,” she said, “try to check underneath, to see if it’s lactating.” Not only did I have to catch the critter, but I also had to give it a physical exam, because it’s best to leave a mama squirrel with her brood until everyone is old enough to move out. Not what I wanted to hear.

I set the trap on Tuesday afternoon, using peanut butter and sunflower seeds as bait. Tuesday night: nothing. Wednesday morning: no change. But by Wednesday afternoon, it was obvious that something was eating the peanut butter without tripping the gate. The bait was virtually gone by Thursday morning, yet the trap remained empty.

That’s when a state biologist returned my call and made it clear that things could get complicated. Squirrels sometimes are too smart to fall for such traps, he said, so I could make it more enticing by covering it with brush and twigs and leaves. I also could sprinkle flour around the trap, to figure out what kind of animal was eating the peanut butter by studying its tracks. Or I could go out and buy something called a glue board, bait it, and wait for the squirrel to get stuck on the board. Applying vegetable oil to the board (or maybe to the squirrel?) would dissolve the glue so the squirrel could be released in an appropriate location.

Since when did trapping a squirrel require the skills of the Great White Hunter?

Baiting the trap yet again, I put it back out in the shed early Thursday afternoon. When I went out to check it a short time later, I had my prisoner. It was so agitated, and so desperate to escape, that its gymnastics gave me a chance to check its belly, which was white and smooth. No signs of lactation, which presumably meant no babies left behind.

Rocket J. Squirrel (as I had taken to calling him) and I got into the car and took a seven-mile ride into the boondocks, where I released him. About two hours later, we got hit with torrential rains and heavy winds here in central Maine. As the storm raged, I wondered if Rocket had found shelter. I even felt badly for him. But not badly enough to welcome him back.