Category: urban wildlife

shorty

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Five weeks ago today my sweet friend Shorty died.

These are the last photos I took of her, back in September when we were still enjoying our mornings together on the front porch.

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Towards the end of the summer she had started climbing into my lap if I wasn’t quick enough to dole out the nuts, and trying to crawl into my pocket to get them herself. We’d reached a level of trust that even allowed me, just a few weeks before she died, to reach out and flick a bit of dried leaf off her hear without so much as a flinch from her.

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I don’t know what happened to her. One minute she was fine, running up and down the fence, wiggling her silly little stump of a tail, and taking walnuts from my hand like always. Four hours later my partner found her dead in the alley with no signs of trauma.

She’s buried in the backyard at the base of this little log feature I made in July out of some cut off pieces of utility pole the workers left in the alley when our poles were replaced.

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important Shorty update!

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You might remember a few weeks ago I mentioned that Shorty had shown up here after an absence of more than three weeks. That was 3 January, and she didn’t show up again until this past Saturday, 8 February. Long enough that I’d done all of my rationalising, reminding myself four years old is pretty old for an urban squirrel et cetera. And then Saturday morning I looked out my bedroom window and there was her familiar bald back and scraggly short tail popping up out of the hole in the lid of our neighbour’s garbage bin. And today she came and sat with me and gently took walnuts out of my hand while I froze on the concrete step in my bathrobe in -12°C on her behalf. I’m so relieved to have her back.

the fencening

In early December we had a new fence installed out back. It’s a big adjustment after nearly 20 years with a backyard wide open to the alley, and feels weird not to be able to see the alley cats coming (although we’ve left plenty of big gaps for them to pass through, as the feral cat highway cuts through our property from front to back).

Here’s the view from the upstairs window:

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Yes, there’s a squirrel hanging on the bird feeder. There is very nearly always a squirrel hanging on the bird feeder.

And the view from the basement studio window:

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Every time we plant a tree or put up a new feeder or anything I hover at the window like a hyperactive puppy, waiting to see animals interacting with our new stuff. Fittingly, my girl Shorty was the first one over the fence.

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She gave me a little scare recently, not showing up here since December 17 so that I was already starting into the rationalising stage of grief, telling myself she’s pretty old for an urban squirrel (going on 4) and reminding myself this is why we don’t fall in love with wild animals and then she sauntered in here on January 3 and started pigging out on seeds like nothing had happened. I had been about to knock on the door four doors down and ask the residents if a squirrel had died in their roof recently, but since she’s fine please don’t anyone tell my 4-doors-down neighbours that she lives in their roof. She’s lived in that house longer than they have.

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a black squirrel with a short tail creeping towards the leg of a white woman, in the foreground, on which is a tattoo of two squirrels and a cherry branch.

This wonderful tattoo of my two short tailed squirrel friends, Shorty and Stubby Jr., was done for me earlier this year by the amazing Suzie Woodward (instagram link: Suzie Woodward tattoos). We finished up in late July and I spent the next month sitting on the concrete front steps in my jean shorts, nuts in one hand and phone in the other, waiting for Shorty to visit so I could try to get a photo of her next to her portrait. I got loads of photos, because Shorty is comfortable enough to take nuts straight out of my hand, but sadly she’s not very photogenic so this one is the best. Please ignore her embarrassing bald spot; Shorty is at least three years old, a pretty advanced age for an urban squirrel. She has enjoyed life and it shows.

Unfortunately I don’t think Stubby Jr. lives in our neighbourhood anymore; also pushing three, she showed up for the last time in May, about a week after we had finished the outline on this piece. That was the first time that both Shorty and Stubby visited me on the front porch at the same time and both accepted nuts (Stubby only from a distance, Shorty right up in my face as usual).

Here’s a photo of the two of them together at the backyard buffet, taken in August 2021 when they were young and bald-spot-free and our cherry tree, around which they’re chasing each other in their tattoo portrait, was also young and still needed a rope in case it toppled.

view of a backyard with flagstone patio in the foreground, steel vegetable beds in the background, and a young cherry tree in the middle with a bird feeder and two black squirrels.

And here’s Shorty last summer, viewed out the dining room window, demolishing a sunflower that, admittedly, she probably planted there herself.

a black squirrel sitting on a sunflower head, eating seeds, while suspended over a flagstone patio viewed from above.