Hey, Tim Jones, here. I have said before that our family has a thing for aviation, but this post isn’t about that kind of flying. This post concerns the flying squirrel, at left.
A little background; We have animals. As of this past Christmas, we have a domestic mammal to human ratio of exactly 1:1. Living with, and sponging off the four of us, we have 2 cats and 2 dogs. The dogs don’t really come into this story.
Our latest arrival is my daughter’s prim, slender and graceful grey tabby. Being new, she has been kept mostly inside. Our other cat, Ozzie (named for the character Ozymandias, of the Tripods trilogy) is an outdoor veteran, and comes and goes as he pleases. He’s also huge. This Maine Coon cat has actually been mistaken for a real racoon on more than one occasion. One thing I like about him is that he doesn’t seem to need us, but hangs around, anyway. I figure he must like us.
He likes us so much, in fact, that he sometimes brings us "presents". He most often leaves these presents on the front doorstep, and they are most often dead.
Most often.
Occasionally, they are "only mostly dead", and rarely (when he wants something to play with, I guess) Ozzie brings us an animal that is apparently not even injured. Not even a little. This has led to a few memorable episodes, one of which involved a huge field rat, a pair of weenie tongs, and a Big Gulp cup.
This last week, Ozzie brought us, at 5:00 in the morning, the above pictured living, healthy flying squirrel, in full vigor. He promptly let it loose. Now, flying squirrels are really cute, as well as fast, and they are jumpy. I’m just here to say, that unless your whole family have chased a flying squirrel aound the house in your pajamas, you have just never had any fun. We were all nearly in tears of laughter by the time the little dickens was succesfully captured (first we had to hustle our domestic furries into various bedrooms, in order to prevent them tearing Francis to bits… that’s what we named it – a fine unisex name, could be "Francis" or "Frances", and, you know, invoking a saint in these situations can never hurt).
The whole point, of course, was to capture Francis without injury. In the end, I managed to pop a Tupperware tub over him, and shortly we all gathered outside in the dark to watch him scamper off. I couldn’t help but think that it was a lot like an alien abduction story, and wondered if he had a family to whom he would have to explain the whole episode. I expect that coming in with the strong scent of cat on your fur would be a little unusual in squirrel society.
Anyway, the operation was successful. We rescued from a grisly end a creature of a species we were not even aware lived in the neighborhood. I always thought flying squirrels were kind of exotic. It turns out they are pretty common, but rarely seen, because they are nocturnal. Nocturnal animals are cool.
