There is a three-legged squirrel that lives in the big spruce in our backyard.
I’ve been watching it through our bay window the past few months, as it performs incredible “one-handed” grabs as it leaps from our fence to the nearest branch. Though missing one of its front legs, it can still strip a pine cone in minutes, rotating the cone with one leg against the stump of it’s missing leg as it separates seed from chaff.
There have been a few times when we’ve caught one another’s gaze through the glass, and held eye contact for a bit. We’ve met, so to speak. He certainly saw me puttering in the backyard before the snow fell. Occasionally when he sees me he opens his mouth and gives me heck in the form of a machine-gun rattle.
It makes me wonder if he recognizes me, or if every time he sees me it’s a brand new, scary human.
Squirrels are highly territorial, and I’ve always taken their rattle to mean “Get the hell out of here. It’s my territory. MINE.”
An injury-free existence in squirrel society depends largely on knowing and observing your neighbours’ boundaries. When you don’t, you certainly hear about it, if not worse.
However, it turns out rattling is more complicated than that—not all rattles mean the same thing. Sure, they might sound the same to us, but studies have pretty clearly shown that squirrels respond more intensely to rattles played from stranger squirrels, than to those played from neighbours. This is a phenomenon known in many species as the dear-enemy effect, in which animals of the same species with established adjacent territories are less aggressive with their neighbours than with those they don’t know.
It’s thought this is beneficial to the established squirrel because as he becomes used to his neighbour and aware of her skills, over time he can be more confident that she is unlikely to harm him, or try to take his territory. He therefore saves time and energy in not having to act defensively, and this increases the time and energy he has for other activities.
When it comes to squirrels, it’s actually even more fine-tuned than that. Not only do squirrels have specific rattles to identify a neighbour versus a stranger, but they appear to have different rattles for individual squirrels. In other words, it’s not just “Hi neighbour,” but “Hello, Bob who lives next door.” It kind of makes me wonder what they’re saying when we walk by.
Not that we’ll ever know. When three-legs is yelling at me, my untrained ears have no way of knowing whether he’s simply a disgruntled neighbour that’s more or less tolerating me, or if he’s really trying to threaten me.
All I know is that I have a lot of respect for the way he’s ripping around minus an appendage, and I’m willing to take the abuse.
Niki Wilson
Special to the Fitzhugh
