The Last Word On Nothing

There is currently a war raging in my yard. For the past week a handful of squirrels (I can’t honestly say how many since I can’t tell them apart) have been fighting. And not just the regular squibble squabble squirrel fight. A full on, screaming, bloody, vicious battle.

The first day it was mostly shrieking. Did you know that squirrels could shriek? I did not. It’s this raspy wheezing piercing sound that at first just kind of sounds like a bird call. Like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5QqmHByMsE

But in our yard this has gotten more and more frantic, louder, more piercing, more like a scream than a call. One squirrel would yell, another would yell louder.

The second day the real fighting began. I still don’t know exactly how many squirrels are involved in this, in the same way that nobody really knows how many Game of Thrones characters there actually are. They scurried around in the trees, still screaming, and this time actually tackling and grappling with one another. For hours.

The third day it got ugly. I’m not sure what the turning point really was, but at some point in the midst of the third day of the Great Squirrel War things got really nasty. At one point two of them were dangling from a low branch, biting the crap out of each other. I could see fur flying off. At another point a squirrel grabbed another squirrel and tossed it to the ground. It landed with a thud, and limped away very slowly. I could see blood in its fur. That night I found tufts of squirrel fur, skin still attached, laying on the ground beneath the tree.

Today is the fourth day of the Great Squirrel War. At first it was quiet. I thought it was over. But no. It is still going. The screaming began around 11 am, they slept in, and then the whole show began again. I don’t know when it might end.

So, what is going on here? I had seen squirrels squabble before, but nothing like this.

According to some very nice people on Twitter who also happen to be squirrel experts, what I witnessed is probably a male defending his territory from encroaching youngsters. According to Jessica Haines, who studies red squirrels this is the time of year when kids leave the next and try to find their own place to live. But she also said that gray squirrels aren’t usually as vicious as the reds, and based on my very blurry photo of a squirrel in our tree, she thinks we’ve got gray squirrels. Andrea Wishart, who studies red squirrels, said it was unusual to see gray’s actually trying to kill eachother. “In my experience with greys, they rarely physically contact each other, usually more bluffing, so this is wild!” she said on Twitter.

Still, it’s probable that a male is defending his right to the tree in our yard. Or it’s possible that one squirrel tried to free the squirrel slaves and now is being hunted and there are dragons or something. Can you tell I don’t watch Game of Thrones?

There’s not a lot of literature I could find about squirrel fights. There are some studies that talk about the competition between red and grey squirrels, but as far as intraspecies battles I couldn’t find much to explain what I was seeing. (Jessica did point me to a study done in Guelph, Canada where locals could tag and track squirrels around the city. Although based on what I’ve witnessed recently I don’t want to cross a squirrel any time soon.) I suppose it’s simply the usual: animals fight for territory, for mates, for food. Fighting is a normal and unremarkable thing, even among fluffy squirrels.

Top image: BirdPhotos.com

Bottom image: Rose’s bad iPhone photography