Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Stumpytail

One day in the fall of 1995, my kids and I suddenly discovered that one of our backyard squirrels had been badly injured—her tail was torn off. That is, the skin and fur had been torn off—leaving a kinked string of raw vertebrae and muscle. The squirrel seemed to move okay, but was clearly in pain, and day after day what was left of her tail got increasingly infected, turning purple and then bluish green splotched with white. And she became weak, clearly sick from the infection. She was way too timid to take peanuts out of our hands, but we watched for her and whenever we noticed her we tossed her peanuts and walnuts. As the weather got colder and colder, the tail became frostbitten and finally broke off, leaving just a little stump, which quickly and completely healed over.

Stumpytail became a regular fixture in our yard. We have a lot of squirrels in our neighborhood—I’ve counted as many as 22 at a time in our backyard on more than one occasion—but Stumpy was distinctive and unusually tame. She’d hop up to the front and back porches several times a day to get peanuts, and eventually learned that I spend much of the day working upstairs. When there weren’t any nuts on the porch, she’d climb up the box elder tree next to the house and look for me through the window. If I was at my desk, she’d give me a hard stare until I suddenly felt her gaze. She knew that if I looked at her and got up, I’d head downstairs to set out more peanuts, and was always at the door before I opened it.

A couple of years ago, when she’d been coming for over 6 years, Stumpytail disappeared for several weeks. We were pretty sure she’d been killed by a predator or hit by a car, but then one afternoon when I was driving down Peabody Street I spotted her a couple of blocks from my house. I stopped the car for a moment, opened the window and called to her, telling her to stop by for some peanuts one of these days. Then I headed home. By the time I parked the car in the garage and went to the front door, there she was, running along the sidewalk and up the steps, straight to my front porch. I don’t know what about this pleased me more: to see her again or to know for sure that she obviously remembered me. But it was deeply satisfying having her for a friend. Her nest was somewhere down my block, on the other side of the street, but she knew her way around the neighborhood, having lived here for at least 8 ½ years. Every spring and late summer I could tell she was nursing babies, but she never brought them around, apparently preferring to keep her professional life separate. Last year one of her grown babies tried nursing when she was clearly thinking she was done with all that for the season. He latched on while she ran up and down the box elder trunk trying to shake him. She finally lost patience and bit him good and hard and he let go. But that was the only baby of Stumpy’s that I ever saw.

I spent the last half of January in Chicago visiting family, and missed Duluth’s big snowstorm. That kind of weather isn’t normally too hard on a squirrel, but the day after the storm, the snow banks blocking visibility and motor sounds muffled, Stumpy apparently tried to cross Peabody Street at the wrong moment. When Russ shoveled the front walk, he found her body buried in the snow from the plow.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that it isn’t sensible to get attached to a rodent. They have a short lifespan, and there are always plenty more where they came from. There are plenty of plucky little squirrels on the planet, some that have even survived losing a tail. But Stumpytail was special. She was my friend. And I’ll never forget her.