Squirrel swims across pool to escape from a dog
The eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis)
There are many stories of how the common gray squirrel has outwitted those of us who love to feed our backyard birds and fool the engineers who design bird feeders. After many years of observation of wild and domestic critters I can agree with those who laud the “smarts” of the gray and also say that all too often we humans underestimate the mental abilities of so called “dumb animals“. The fact is that if we observe them long and closely enough, we find that many of them are “thinking” much like we do. Perhaps some do some mental gyrations even better than we do.
Like many of us these days confined by the fear of Covid, my wife and I have been able to spend more time bird watching. Lately our back yard nature observations have revealed to us a particularly smart gray squirrel ( Sciurus carolinensis) which has been finding ingenious ways to get to the seeds and nuts offered (only) to our avian visitors in backyard bird feeder.
After rapid disappearance of a good half pound of bird food I thought I had figured outing a way to frustrate this fellow ( I assume he this one is a male). But then I saw him testing and then avoiding the Vaseline smeared pole topped with the bird feeder and instead climbing up a near by bush. From there this smart guy made a leap to the the curved arm of the pole (no Vaseline there) and hanging only by his hind feet and stretching across the void, he could reach the feeder, poke his fore leg- terminating in a paw that looks much like a human hand — through the feeder and grasp a “handful” of super expensive “fruit and nut” wild bird feed.
“Did you see that guy?” I called over to my wife looking through the window, over the edge of her morning coffee cup at the four legged marauder.
“He’s the one”, she murmured, “that one with the white tipped tail, he jumps onto the top of the feeder and tips it over” she said, adding. “But he’s nice enough to clean up whatever he spills“.
“All he got this time was a paw full,” I said watching as the fluffy gray boldly jumped from the feeder to the top of our wooden picnic table just twenty feet from our glass slider door.
Just beyond the table, across a short stretch of brick patio the light from the morning sun glimmered off the water of our in-ground pool. Our sicurid raider seemed to be very content with himself as he sat breakfasting comfortably on our food and on our poolside table.
There, he perched himself upright on his haunches, his tail curled upward like an umbrella over his head and began nibbling at the goodies in his front paws. His big fluffy tail with its white tip twitched rhythmically, apparently in response to the enjoyment and satisfaction of his stolen meal. (By the way the genus name Sicurus is a derived from this critter’s long tail —Gr “urus” = tail, and “sica” = shade— or “an animal which can use its tail for shade”.)
Though the human observers of this scene could be somewhat amused, it was otherwise for the canine observer. This canine observer was our five-year old Jack Russel terrier. Milo stood stark still staring though the glass at his nemesis and frequent furry quarry. The Jack Russel’s bobbed white tail was held rigidly upright and it vibrated with his intense excitement .
Milo stared at his quarry and whined in anticipation as he focused on the one pound little furry beast perched on the table where even Milo was forbidden to perch .
As a practiced and eager squirrel.chaser, though so far over his five summers always an unsuccessful one, he begged for his masters to open the door and permit him to give chase.
Not as amused with this squirrel’s behavior as was my wife(and being responsible for refilling and repairing the bird feeders), I slowly and silently slid the door ajar and let the eager, panting Jack Russell race from the room like a bull leaving the bucking chute at a rodeo bull riding contest.
In immediate hot pursuit, Milo raced across the deck and leaped down the deck stairway. He landed close to the picnic table, but the squirrel was faster. At the sound of the door opening and the frantic clawing sounds of Milo’s claws scraping on the deck the one pound gray bird/food-robber, leaped from the table just feet from the pool edge.
Here our sicurid marauder proved just how smart and adaptable he was. In a very small fraction of a second the tiny but complex brain of this critter must have had to calculate that at this point in the chase, the much larger dog behind him was too close and too fast for him to escape to the any near tree or large bush. That escape route —up a tree- his usual escape strategy was not available. The closest tree was on the far side of the pool, but that was a good 25 feet across a six foot deep watery barrier with a good eight inch climb out the pool water over the bull nosed brick coping of the pool edge.
To catch the squirrel Milo would have to race around one or the other side of the 40 foot long pool to get to that location. But for the bushy tailed marauder that was the only safe route of escape.
Our gray with the white tipped tail jumped right into the pool and beating the water to a bubbly froth swam the distance across in what I estimate was no more than two seconds, Then without hesitation the squirrel somehow jumped upward to grasped the coarse brick coping and leaped soaking wet out of the pool over the coping on the far side.
The dripping wet squirrel was well up the nearest tree when Milo, growling and barking in frustration, reached the streak of water-stained brick where the wet squirrel had tracked across the brick patio.
I added a new note to my nature observations. I added a codicil to the Sicurus chapter: “squirrels can swim very well”. They can think even better. It took some quick mental calculations to determine that taking a short unlikely and probably his first ever swim was the best route for escape. Yet he calculated that unlikely route was the best and safest snd he made the decision in only a very small fraction of a second.
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