Excerpt from Squirrelland: Imagination and the Alaska Red Squirrel
Contributed by Eric and Doylanne Wade
Let’s imagine a North America red squirrel running along a gnarled spruce branch, a slalom route taken many times before, its movement unique among other tree dwellers, its explosiveness eye blinking. It leaps to a higher branch and stops in a heartbeat. It wastes no energy, every twitch purposeful. With its head rock-still, it can scan the surroundings with excellent color vision. Its pale-yellow lenses function much like sunglasses. It can focus across the retina, meaning it processes superb vision out the sides of its eyes. Humans have peripheral vision, but with a marred, out of focus image, whereas, a red squirrel can clearly see the designs of a fluttering butterfly off to its side without moving its head. The squirrel appears to be weightless. It bounds into the autumn air to another branch and runs to the spruce tips and balances there on the slender ends, hind feet gripping the waving and bouncing boughs. A nine-ounce, diminutive super athlete, all muscle, speed, and agility, masters the high-bar of the wilderness, the wobbly tip of a white spruce. At birth it weighed half an ounce, a helpless, hairless peanut with little chance to ever leave the nest. Its eyes stay closed for nearly a month.
This squirrel is from the order Rodentia, family Sciuridae, and its scientific name is Tamiasciurus hudsonicus. It’s the only squirrel I’ve seen at our place in the boreal forest in interior Alaska, but there is another. Flying squirrels also live in the trees here, but after years poking around in the woods, I’ve never seen one, so I’ll let them be and focus only on the hudsonicus. I’ve seen dozens of them through the years, dashing through horsetail and rose bushes to tree trunks, dodging spruce grouse along the way.
My imaginary squirrel picks its way to a dense growth of spruce cones and begins biting through the soft stems and tossing the cones to the ground, sometimes in clusters of three or four, each landing with a soft thud near the base of the tree, a unique sound in the forest. As it jerks its head to toss the cones, the hair on its head is illuminated by a ray of sunlight, revealing the color that explains its name, a burnt red, warm, earthy color. Its belly is white, as are the circles around each eye. Its tail, often stretched for balance, is tipped with dense gray and black hairs. These tail hairs have bands of color, meaning a strand of hair has different colors. I haven’t noticed much variation in the coloring of red squirrels. They all look about the same to me, donned in a rich coat with a remarkable ability to disappear in a shadow. They do, though, appear in different sizes. Young squirrels, not long out of the nest, look like little adults.
After throwing a dozen clusters from the tree, the squirrel descends, again dashing, jumping, and freezing in its steps. On the ground now with the cones at its feet, it pauses to eat one. Above the tree canopy, a bald eagle catches a thermal beneath a cumulus cloud and soars, turning, dipping, and radically climbing and most certainly looking for something to eat. The squirrel, now on its haunches, holds a cone in its hands and pulls away the scales (also called bracts) with its incisors, eating the seeds beneath. Its fourth finger, commonly referred to as the ring finger by humans, is its longest, presumably the extra length helpful while gripping branches. Soon a small pile of spruce scales form at its feet. It grabs a band of cones and darts to a midden at the base of a spruce. The eagle, soon to become a dot in the blue, follows the cumulus into the distance.
With danger momentarily absent, the squirrel sings, yes sings. I’ve never heard a squirrel sing but can imagine it. A story passed down by distant ancestors in southwest Alaska tells the story of a squirrel (it could have been a red squirrel) that sings to a raven blocking access to its den. The raven begins to dance to the squirrel’s song, and the squirrel slips inside. This story is recounted in a remarkable book, Nunakun-gguq Ciutengqertut, TheySay They Have Ears Through the Ground: Animal Essays from Southwest Alaska.