DOWN HOME: Fox-in-a-bottle outwits squirrel

Posted: 9/29/07

DOWN HOME:
Fox-in-a-bottle outwits squirrel

Joanna noticed the dead spot first.

While everything else on our lot still shimmered brilliant green, the top eight or 10 feet of the center branch in our favorite maple in the middle of the backyard turned bitter brown.

Not golden amber or rustic crimson, like you might expect of a maple in North Texas six weeks or two months from now. Just bitter brown. Dead brown. This-branch-ain’t-coming-back brown.

We craned our necks to see what had happened up there, near the top of the third-most-stately tree on our property. (I’m partial to the bald cypresses.) We saw a strip of bare, withering trunk where bark used to be.

My thoughts turned to the “tree doctor” we paid to cut webworms out of most of our trees.

When he answered his cell phone, I told him one of his workers must’ve scraped the bark off our tree and killed the big center branch.

He didn’t seem surprised. “Is the bark stripped off all the way around?” he asked.

“Sure is,” I told him.

“Mr. Knox, what you’ve got is a boar squirrel,” he explained. “This is probably his first mating season. See, he climbed up there and stripped that bark off and ‘sprayed’ the spot to mark his turf. Next, he’ll come back to get those dead leaves for his nest so it’ll be all ready when his baby squirrels arrive.”

Now, I don’t believe in haunted houses. But if someone told me squirrels really are ghosts, then I’d say our house is haunted. We’ve just been in it a year, but we’ve already had our share of squirrel nuisances.

Last winter, a squirrel screamed and scraped in the wall between our kitchen and dining room for, oh, “40 days and 40 nights”—or a really long, long time—until he, as they say, gave up the ghost. This spring, a marauding band of punk squirrels acted like our attic was a rodent theme park until we re-covered all the fan vents with wire mesh. And now the squirrel version of Don Juan is trimming our tree to spruce up his lair.

“Mr. Knox, what you need is a bottle of red fox urine,” the tree doctor told me. Anticipating my profound inquiry—“Huh?”—he continued: “The red fox is the natural predator and enemy of your boar squirrel. So, if you can make him think a red fox lives in your backyard, he will leave your maple tree alone.”

Turns out, my friend Peter had half a bottle of the stuff in his garage, and he gave it to me. Now, our puppy, Topanga, has this strange sense she is not alone when she runs out into the backyard. I just hope our little tree-tearing friend feels the same way.

Oh, and lest you think the turf-marking mannerisms of our squirrel and red-fox-in-a-bottle are confined to the animal kingdom, just watch what happens when a visitor to your church sits in the pew that “belongs” to a longtime member.

Fur may fly.

–Marv Knox