New neighbors built their small home within a stone’s throw of Angelkeep’s patio. The pair were somewhat transient, not seen in or near their home very much since the construction. Will they let the place begin to fall apart from neglect? Should Angelkeep fear its neighborhood’s appreciating home appraisals might do a turn and begin to plummet as a result? That’s not a good way to lower property taxes. The entire home development began a bit squirrelly from the beginning.
It was a pair of squirrels that built the wooden structure in the upper branches of the corkscrew willow tree growing on the shore of Angelpond. This new home fell about eye level when standing on the deck over the rear patio. The deck offered looks into the new home. Windows on Angelkeep’s second floor likewise became a peeping-squirrel opportunity to gaze into the human’s home.
Why did they have to build so close?
Angelkeep never had a squirrel home within the border of the property in the past quarter century. They likely existed earlier, but at the turn of the century the tallest cottonwood trees had been removed, clearing space for a wood structure that humans designed. Squirrel nests remained high in trees on both the east and south sides of the property. Squirrels at that time probably thought, “Well, there goes the neighborhood.”
Recent changes in the woods directly to the south of Angelkeep brought about devastating and rapid destruction of a large village of squirrel homes. They never saw it coming. Huge machinery swept through the forest slicing off the largest trees, many oaks, and literally tossed them to and fro like Angelkeep tosses wooden sticks into the patio campfire.
Dozens of squirrel homes, naturalistically called nests and built of wooden sticks, were part of the removed branches tossed into large piles of tree debris. The obvious human goal had been lumber. Squirrel village decimation simply became an unavoidable by-product of the greater human desire, selling logs.
Rabbits gained from the timber harvest with giant skyscraper brush piles under which new bunny homes will surely be snatched up prior to winter. Wildflowers and saplings gained greatly from the opened sun spaces with which to spread. Fresher air movement aided in growth of younger trees that would not have made it in a dense older forest.
Harvesting mature trees prior to rot and wind damage became a good thing for some. Not good for the local squirrel population.
They’d worked hard to obtain the supremacy of all the upper level, penthouse-view, stick-built, squirrel homes constructed over the many years of the woods’ existence. Squirrels resembled the second of the Three Little Pigs living in a stick home. The lumberjack machinery’s arm huffed and puffed and blew their homes down.
Desperation drove the squirrels to build a new nest so near Angelkeep’s love nest. On the human’s plus side, construction days resulted in a unique opportunity to see up close the active scampering taking place of a squirrel home under construction.
One squirrel raced upward to top limbs and nibbled off varying twig segments averaging about a foot in length. It reversed to scamper downward with a piece of construction material in its mouth to the building site. It rapidly wove the ends into segments of the structure already standing.
The other squirrel mimicked the partner in the construction team, but ran downward or outward to secure select pieces of its own lumber for the new home. One returned clinging to a choice piece of nest structure resulting in a need to wait on a limb just outside the nest while the companion squirrel completed weaving a twig-size stud into the wall of the home.
One weaver at a time inside the home proved to be the rule of this building company.
The pair seemed to be extremely efficient, diligent, highly skilled, and energetic, exactly opposite the former description pronounced on them as “squirrelly” when trees were used in playtime.
Summer to fall might hold interesting continued-patio observation of the new nearby squirrel home. Will Angelkeep’s tree house become a vacation spot? A birthing center? An abandoned derelict dwelling? A squatter’s abode?
It’s hard to guess the future since the construction crew proved to be totally “squirrelly.”
Mr. Daugherty is a Wells County resident who, along with his wife Gwen, enjoy their backyard and have named it “Angelkeep.”
