Natural History

I was in deep slumber when it happened, but the sensation of very soft fur and tiny claws scurrying across my face certainly woke me up. Indeed, not only was I up, but I was out of the bed and nearly out the door. Then it crossed my mind to turn on the lights and see what creature had disturbed my sleep.

Whatever the heck it was it, it was brave enough to crawl into bed with a person. At the time, I was but an adolescent, so my imagination was running wild.  My room was just below the attic, and the thought crossed my mind that a bat had crawled down to find a warmer place to roost. I was not too keen on sharing my bed with a bat, for in my part of the world, there is a bat-born strain of the rabies virus.

I knew the furry animal was too large to be a mouse.  A few summers earlier I had seen my grandpa’s Norwegian elkhound kill some rats in a barn. Maybe the creature was a rat.

My curiosity drew me towards the light switch, but when I turned it on, nothing was there. I sifted through my sheets and pillows, but nothing turned up. I looked under my bed and other bedroom furniture. Nothing.

Then the thought crossed my mind to look up. My room had several rafters running parallel across the ceiling. Maybe the creature had run to the ceiling to escape.

I saw a small gray blob hanging from one of the rafters. It was larger than a bat, but much smaller than any rat. It was roughly the size of a lemon.

Then I noticed that the blob had large black eyes and elfin ears.  By then I had already developed into a something of amateur naturalist, and I knew what had woken me. It was a southern flying squirrel.

I don’t know why I screamed at that moment, but I did anyway. Maybe I was terrified that such a creature could intrude into my space while I was sleeping. After all, I was not immune to delusion that I, as a human, had absolute control over all nature.

My parents were in the room in a instant, and my father turned and ran into the kitchen. He returned with a broom.

He then did what many men do when they discover an unwanted rodent in the house. He decided to kill it with a broom. However, flying squirrels are far more agile than any rat or mouse, and within just a few second it had escaped back into the attic through a very small crack in the ceiling.

Well, there was no point in digging through the attic at that hour, so the squirrel had escaped that night.

In the morning, my father brought in a rabbit trap. A few summers before, we had rabbit trouble. The cottontails had eaten up most of the beans, and the problem was remedied using a live box trap, which was baited with an apple.

The trap was placed in the attic and baited with popcorn.

It was late that night when I heard the door on the trap slam shut.

The little pixie who had woken me from my slumber had been caught.

The next evening, the trap was taken to the hillside behind my house, where there were several large hickory and oak trees. A maple tree at the corner of the lawn had a large bird house, which, I had surmised, was perfect home for a flying squirrel. The squirrel was set free at the base of one of the hickories, and he scurried up the tree. He nearly reach the top, when I saw him glide. It was the first time I’d ever seen one glide, and it was quite impressive.

However, instead of gliding up the hill and deeper into the forest, his route was down hill and towards the house. He landed in one the maples at the edge of the yard, then sailed off towards another one and another, until he was in a tree very close the the house.  He then glided on the roof, where I assume he disappeared into the attic.

He’d returned home.

I was willing to let him stay.

For a few months, he often visited me in my room, running across the rafters at night, making just enough noise to wake me up.  He never again got in bed with me. However, one night, I felt some warm liquid dropping on my forehead, and I soon realized that my little friend had urinated on me.  To say the least, I was not too happy about that.

Well, it wasn’t long before my little friend told all of his friends about our attic, and by the end of that year, we had at least a dozen flying squirrels in our attic.

And then my dad started trapping them– with rat traps. I wasn’t happy with that, but they were eating up all the things we had the attic. Our Christmas decorations were being mutilated, and the wires to our Christmas lights were in shreds.

To try and change his mind about killing them, I had discovered that there was an endangered species of flying squirrel in West Virginia. The Virginia northern flying squirrel was, until recently, listed on the Endangered Species list. Now, the northern and southern species of flying squirrel are very similar, but the northern species is found mostly in Canada and the northern tier of states. The Virginia subspecies is an isolated population that lives in the High Alleghenies. I grew up in the Allegheny Plateau region, not the mountains proper, so the species in my attic was the southern.

After a few weeks of intensive rat trapping, the squirrels were all gone– or so I thought. Then one night I heard a scurrying sound, and I looked up at the rafters. Just a few inches from the crack in the ceiling, a flying squirrel was hanging upside down. In its mouth was something pink.

The pink thing had what appeared to be translucent wings hanging down from its sides. When I looked closer, I realized that this was a flying squirrel mother carrying her newborn baby. The baby was quite small and pink like a baby mouse or hamster, but unlike those animals, it had distinctive little membranes hanging off of it. These were the sails of the flying squirrel.

The mother squirrel carried her baby across the ceiling, and then she turned around and went back through the crack into the attic. I never saw her or her baby again.

In fact, shortly after that, all the outside cracks around the roof leading to the attic were sealed, and no flying squirrel would ever enter the attic again.

And none would ever come into my bed again.