I woke up on a recent pre-dawn morning to a strange sound in the living room. Was that my husband’s footsteps?
His voice called, “I need help!”
I threw on a robe, found my glasses and ran. Had a burglar broken in? Was a bear lumbering on our deck? “What’s wrong?” Barely awake with eyes still focusing, I saw Dick on the other end of the living room.
Suddenly a small brown figure streaked from the living room to the kitchen. My mouth dropped. “A squirrel! How’d it get in the house”?
There wasn’t time for an answer because the brown streak hurtled in my direction. “Get him moving to the door and I’ll open it.” Dick yelled. I tried, but the creature slipped past me before I could move an eyelash and Dick could open the door.
“That thing is sure fast!” I watched in awe as the squirrel executed a perfect about face and scooted behind the sofa.
Dick explained. He’d heard scratching, rustling sounds in the living room. Upon investigation, he spotted a squirrel running on the living room’s outside window ledge, and then realized the squirrel wasn’t outside. It was in our living room scampering along the top of the sofa.
The critter’s big brown eyes and skin flap told him it was a flying squirrel. The thing could run, jump and leap at a phenomenal speed as we discovered in the next ten minutes.
“There it goes!
“Quick! It’s in the hall. No! It’s in the back bedroom!”
“Now it’s in the bathroom! In the tub!”
Dick grabbed a bath towel, “I’ll throw the towel over it and bring it outside.”
The squirrel had already whizzed into the back bedroom where it scampered across a small adding machine on the bedside table, causing it to perform some kind of calculation. Next the light-footed critter nimbly jumped to a nearby lampshade. Following that feat, it successfully launched a leap to a Christmas cactus sitting on a plant rack in front of the French doors.
We looked at each other. “The door! We might be able to get the patio door open and shoo our flying squirrel friend outside. Dick lunged for the plant rack, which had wheels and moved easily. He opened the patio door wide, and, thank goodness the squirrel dashed for the open air and disappeared into the night.
According to The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, flying squirrels are nocturnal and glide, not fly. A mild-mannered creature, they live in hollow trees or leaf nests and eat fruits and nuts, insects, meat scraps and are frequent visitors to bird feeders. Maybe we’ll see this one again.
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