Last fall, I met someone who was volunteering at a wildlife rescue station somewhere in the city, and when I asked what kinds of wildlife they were rescuing at that time, she said squirrels. Lots of baby squirrels–because it was a mast year for oak trees in the Philadelphia area, that is, “a season in which various species of trees synchronize their reproduction and drop large amounts of fruit and/or nuts.” That meant there were enough acorns to support three, not just the usual two, cycles of matings and births from spring through fall. Some in the last crop of squirrels were too late to make it when the weather turned–until the rescue station stepped in.
Many of us noticed the unusually heavy blanket of acorns last year. Look around and I believe you’ll notice that this year, we’ve got a bumper crop of squirrels. They are already wreaking havoc in my garden, a situation that is going to have to be rectified one way or another.
I photographed the very healthy squirrel (seen above), just as he was taking his first tentative nibble of a patch of leaf lettuce that I had recently moved over to my backyard garden from the greenhouse. He clearly liked it. It had been razed within a day or two (see below).
