Some of our neighborhood creature-dads play an important role in child-rearing. Others, not so much. It’s Father’s Day, so I thought I would pay tribute to the feathered fathers whose parenting roles I’ve been privileged to observe.
Which treetop dads help out with the parenting? And which forest fellows leave the child-rearing to mom?
What we’ve long called our ‘squirrel tree’ gave us a special treat this spring. A mama squirrel nested in a corner of a craggy snag that’s easy to see from the house. Most of her kit-rearing took place out of view, deeper in the tree. But when it was time for Mama to nudge the kids from the nest, we got a front-row seat to her parenting.
I’m glad I had the video cam ready. You will really want to see Mama’s get-them-out-of-the-house technique.
Or, so I thought.
I write about business finance, and I’ve produced thousands of pages of course material, journal articles, and books. Naturally, I assumed writing a 32-page, 500-word picture book would be both fun and easy. The stories unfolding out my window practically tell themselves, like the bad-boy nestling story in this post’s video clip.
Turning these stories into children’s literature should have been a walk in the park. Or in my case, a walk in the woods.
I could not have been more mistaken.
Not the doctor-looking-at-your-tonsils aww, but the one you bring out when you see something impossibly cute. Or the aww that means something has tickled your sense of wonder. I was struck by a little of both on a day of nonstop gloom, cold, and drizzle. It was a June day masquerading as early April.
But as you’ll see, what I saw in the trees made me grateful for the day’s miserable weather.
Squirrels popping in and out of holes like whack-a-mole, minus the whacking. Chase scenes straight out of Disney—squirrel nose chasing squirrel tail, three and sometimes four in a line, circling the trunk and diving into this hole or that one. This was nature’s comedy routine.
And then a mama raccoon exercised squatter’s rights.
