While we waited for our meals to arrive in a restaurant recently, a mother and young son were waiting for theirs, at the next table. They were in their own little bubble of love. The little fellow had just placed his hand against his mother’s hand and discovered that his pointer finger was as long as her pinky.
This involved snuggling, of course, as he sat on her left and measured his left hand against her upraised left hand. The two of them admired how big he was getting, then Mom moved on to measuring her other fingers against his pointer. Sure enough, her hand as a whole was still larger than his, which neither of them minded a bit.
The boy won’t remember this moment, in the days and years to come, but his mother may. It may please her, when he’s a teenager, say, to recall this time when he was small and happy to be with her and completely at ease with public affection.
Yesterday morning, I directed Rascal off the sidewalk and into the street, to detour a man steadying his phone on his knee to photograph a robin. The bird flew off as we came by, and I asked, “Did you get him?”
The man looked puzzled for a moment, then said, “We’ve been watching a nest of robins beside the house, and today’s the day the babies fledged.” He wasn’t shooting the adult robin, but a baby robin mostly concealed in the long grass. “The kids are in school now, so they missed it, and they’ll be disappointed, so I’m taking pictures for them. The dad robin was going to feed the baby a worm, then thought better of it. I think he’ll be back, though.” The dog and I left the man there, doing something nice for his kids and, not incidentally, helping them become tomorrow’s conservationists.
Out in front of our neighbor’s house, two boards are leaning up against a tree: a 1” x 10” and a 2” x 2”. These, Cory explained, are squirrel ladders. He was looking out the front window last Sunday and saw a mama fox squirrel trying to climb their Japanese zelkova while carrying a baby squirrel in her mouth.
Three times she tried to make it up the tree, and three times she fell. The trunk of the tree tapers gently inward for the first bit; she had no trouble with that part. Then the trunk tapers outward again, and Mama couldn’t get a good enough grip on the bark to make it past the inflection point. She tried mightily, but it couldn’t be done.
So, Cory said, he decided to help her out. “After all, it was Mother’s Day.”
He set the wide board against the tree. After several tries, Mama figured out how to use it. At first, she’d tried climbing the trunk and then jumping to the board, but that didn’t work. Even once she’d got the hang of it, though, she couldn’t do it with the baby in her mouth. This baby wasn’t much smaller than Mama, and by now Mama was tired.
That’s why Cory added the narrow board. For the baby. Sure enough, the baby was able, after repeated tries, to grip both sides of that board and pull itself up. Whereupon, Mama went back for another baby, moving a total of three babies as the day went on.
Why move at all? Our best surmise is that the relo had something to do with Jon and Rebecca’s new dog, as Mama was coming from the direction of Jon and Rebecca’s yard. Google says squirrels move their offspring to a new nest when they’re about six weeks old, anyway, so maybe the pursuit of new digs had nothing to do with an active new puppy near the old nest. The day appointed for a move may just have arrived.
In any case, Mama was having trouble, and Cory decided to help. Even better, he figured out how to help in ways that both Mama and the babies could use. Squirrel ladders: an idea whose time came to our neighborhood last Sunday.
According to Google, various folks have independently designed ladders to help squirrels. Some of them are even built in the form of miniature ladders. Presumably, people have seen a need and met it, in acts of interspecies kindness. What with Cory’s ladders, the human mother and son measuring fingers together, the dad documenting robin babies’ first day out of the nest to share with his children, and the squirrel mama’s moving-day exploits, this week has been full of tenderness.
17 May 2024