Last Fall while walking to my car on the beautiful campus where my day job is I stumbled across these two little rat looking things. I didn’t know what they were, but being familiar with most of the wildlife on our campus, I figured they couldn’t be rats.
There were two, laying helplessly on the side of the road, not in direct danger of being run over by a car but certainly in danger of being picked up by the ferel cats on the campus. Although I was running late to pick up my husband after work, I just didn’t feel it was right to leave these little innocent newly born creatures there. They needed help if they were going to survive.
I called up my husband and described them to him. He said they had to be squirrels. And it made sense because our campus has so many little squirrels being busy about the campus. It looked like these little guys had fallen down from a tree because there were parts of what looked to be a nest close by. That’s what threw me off … nests and squirrels?
I quickly learned that squirrels do have nests up in trees. Yes it’s cliche, but you really do learn new things every day.
I went to grab a soft towel from somewhere so that I could pick up these two vulnerable little creatures and take them to wildlife care center so they could get them in good shape and release them back onto the campus.
These are them!
The reason I know they are black squirrels is because our campus has them all over … plus the wildlife vets confirmed that they were eastern gray squirrels with a genetic mutation. Pretty cool, huh? Well, what’s even cooler is that they aren’t even supposed to be so many in California. Black squirrels are way more common in the MidWest — Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin. I feel totally lucky to have seen them and to have them in my own backyard so to speak.
I was honored to rescue these little guys. I let the wildlife vets know where they were from and requested that they be brought back to our campus because they have a very fine home waiting for them.
I named these two newborn squirrels “East” and “West”.
Here’s what they look like now –
…looks a lot like Truffle, my itsy bitsy chihuahua.
Sayonara!
Nothin but a WeeBitThing …