Squirrels!
An interesting article from 2014 about how the urban squirrel is a human creation:
In his paper, Benson quotes an 1853 Philadelphia newspaper article describing how introducing squirrels and other animals would help turn public squares into “truly delightful resorts, affording the means of increasing enjoyment to the increasing multitudes that throng this metropolis.”
At the time, squirrels were so rare in urban environments that when a pet squirrel escaped from a home in New York City in 1856 and sought refuge in a tree, it drew hundreds of excited onlookers.
While the earlier introduction efforts failed — some cities culled the squirrels, concerned about their impact on birds and on potential tree damage — the second ones took. Landscape architects such as Frederick Law Olmsted transformed cities with their natural park designs. With green spaces, squirrels could get a pawhold.
One of my daughter’s favorite repeat YouTube videos is this guy who set up a squirrel obstacle course in his back yard. He has four regular squirrels that show up that he names and tracks. (It’s more interesting than I make it sound.)
Mark Rober is an absolute gem. I love his stuff. Oh and squirrels are pretty cute.Report
They cause so many power failures that the system(s) used to track the reasons for outages makes “squirrels” a separate category. They will also gnaw through communications cables, both copper and fiber (on a couple of occasions, shutting down the NYSE). When I worked at Bell Labs many years ago, I met one of the world’s experts on squirrels’ sense of taste. The Labs employed him to research compounds that (a) squirrels didn’t like the way it tasted, (b) squirrels didn’t die from ingesting it, and (c) it could be mixed with the plastic sheathing for aerial cables.Report
The obvious solution was to place difficult, but not impossible, to reach walnut dispensers spread along the path of the cable, to distract the squirrels.Report
Ah, paying the Squirrelgeld.
They’re basically rats with better PR.Report
When I was a lad, in a rural area where my uncle the manager of the local John Deere dealership knew all the farmers, and most silos still had wooden roofs, which squirrels would gnaw through allowing rain to get in and ruin the corn, Squirrelgeld was something my uncle arranged and farmers paid me to assassinate squirrels living in their woodlots.
Too much wine this evening, given that sentence.Report