Babies from Heaven

Saturday, April 18, Guinness and I exited our garage at the same time as our neighbors walked out of theirs. Guinness made a dash towards them, but stopped short to sniff something on the ground. It was a gray baby animal which looked like a giant baby mouse, bigger than an adult mouse. We immediately thought rat!

Behind our townhouses is conservation land with a creek and park. The creek has been “under construction” for the past months. They removed a dam among other things. So the likelihood of rats coming up from the creek is plausible. We also considered that a hawk could have flown over and dropped it accidentally.

The neighbor scooped up the baby with a shovel and threw it over the fence to the conservation wildlands. As we stood there pondering the situation, another baby plopped at our feet! I took a picture of this one to show our pest control company, plus the neighbors saved this one in a can.




We examined our roofs from the ground, but could see nothing unusual except we discovered three active wasp nests on the neighbor’s roof line.

I went inside to look out our bedroom dormer window which overlooks the roof and eave over our den. There was a black baby curled up on our leaf guard.



At first, I was confused about the different colors, yet they had to be from the same litter. Assuming that gray and black squirrels intermarry, their offspring could be multiple colors within a litter. After looking up baby rats, baby squirrels, and baby opossums on the Web, it seemed evident that they were squirrels. The long, slender “fingers” were the defining feature.

The pest control people came Monday morning the 20th in the pouring rain and confirmed that they were indeed squirrels. Then they scanned our roofs for a likely place to find a nest and found two places, one on their roof and one on ours, where the juncture of soffit and roof leaves a space large enough for a squirrel to get inside, plus they had eaten away some stucco to get inside. Since there are usually four or more babies in a squirrel litter, they suspected that there still was another baby and that the mother was up there as well. They could not climb up the steep roof on a wet day, so they returned later in the week and installed a one-way door for the squirrels to exit, but then not be able to reenter. Finally, yesterday, a roofing man came to remove the one-way door and seal off the hole with metal. Once they know there is a nice place for a nest, they will gnaw through anything their teeth can puncture to get back in there. We had the same problem years ago in St. Louis and had to cover the area with unsightly tin to keep them out of our attic. I have often wondered what the next owners thought of that unsightly tin! Fortunately, this tin is nearly invisible on the stucco.

Our new wildlife adventure is a large raccoon that has taken up residence in a tree behind our house. What an adorable face!