All Creatures Great & Small
3 October 2007
God I feel overwhelmed with the state of the world some days. Overwhelmed, powerless and unable to imagine how I can make a difference.
However, yesterday I had an opportunity to put into practice one of my fave bumper bar stickers, “Think Globally Act Locally.”
By acting locally, in fact, in my backyard locally, I carried out a simple act of kindness that in no way positively influenced the state of affairs in the Middle East or Africa.
Nor did I take action to help mothers and babies around the world impacted by drought, flood, famine, disease and poverty - not yesterday, anyway.
My call to action was in response to a different kind of need: an alarmed squeaking from a small creature that had gotten itself in a very big spot of bother.
A couple of months ago I noticed a mother squirrel relocating her squirming and hairless baby from the top of one tree outside my apartment, to the top of another. She struggled with the job because she has a disabling tumor on her back leg that slows her down.
Fast forward: This week that baby ventured out of the nest and began exploring the nearby trees, my roof, and the downward drainpipe at the edge of my roof.
I haven’t seen the mother in a while. Maybe the tumor and the physical cost of feeding her infant have compounded her ill health, possibly leading to her death, and this then might explain why her baby was exploring unsupervised.
You have the gist of what happened, right? Curious baby squirrel on roof pokes nose in drain pipe, then pokes nose in further to investigate dark cavity and whoops, falls into drainpipe and gets stuck.
I have American friends who think squirrels are pesky rodents. Maybe I’d think that too if I’d grown up here. In Australia we have a rodent-like creature called a possum, which, though it is on the protected species list, is a real pest. My American friends would no doubt think the possum “cute.”
So yes, I think squirrels are cute, too cute to leave for dead.
And so I dislodged the drainpipe from its base, shook the pipe about, and with that, out popped the squirrel’s tail, and then its bottom and back feet. But it was really stuck and this meant I had to pull the rest of it out by the tail.
This morning, I found myself staring at baby squirrel staring back at me from the branch of one of those trees in my backyard. It did the squirrel jive, swished its tail, and made noises that I interrupted along lines of …
“Hey You, You with the beady eyes and big head, my tail bloody well hurts where you yanked on it yesterday, but say, that’s okay, coz guess what, today’s a new day and there’s stuff to see and stuff to explore and oh boy, I’m alive!”
October 4th, 2007 at 10:48 am