I don't know if anyone has figured it out yet but we are a little weird about animals. We seem get abnormally attached, especially to things that are not your run-of-the-mill pets. No dogs or cats here. We had a brief stint with some guinea pigs where we learned that they are not the pets for us. We were very fond of Chase's spider, if a little creeped out, and were very sad when the spider didn't make it. The tortoise was dear to our hearts, which are still aching a bit over his horrible passing. There's the bearded Dragon Omnom who's been in the family for 6 years now. He's awesome. And of course you know about the continuing saga of the chickens. Heaven forbid we open our hearts to an animal with a life-span of over a decade.
So who's the latest creature to leap into our affections? This one is worse than ever. It's a squirrel.
A SQUIRREL.
Our neighborhood has had an influx of these gimongous fox squirrels over the past few years. I kind of love them - they are so huge and adorable as they scamper around. Of course, it's less adorable when they chew on people's houses and stuff, which we have seen them do. But romping through the yard and chasing each other from branch to branch in the trees is so cute. But of course you could never tell one apart from the other...except...this one. One poor squirrel had an accident of some kind and now only has half a tail. And he's really extra chubby. It made it easy to pick him out of a crowd. Chase named him Bingus, though I have no idea where he got the name. Seems like the kind of word you'd use as a curse word filler. But it also seemed suddenly like a great name for this critter we saw around. And, because we are us, we started paying more and more attention to it which of course led to us trying to make friends with it.
It seems so wrong to just admit that we left treats outside for this one squirrel but we totally did. I think at this point in the story, "we" is actually just me. Like I'd make popcorn, see Bingus in the yard, and go and leave a little scoop of kernels for him at the base of a tree. It must have worked because eventually Bingus was showing up on a regular basis, even venturing onto our back porch. (It became important not to put anything on the back table that squirrels could eat if we didn't want them to.) And with his increased interest came our increased treat supplying. By the beginning of this year I confess to actually buying a bag of walnuts with him in mind, leaving a few out every day. And that did the trick. I now consider Bingus an official friend/pet/wild-animal-acquaintance. Every day around the same time, Bingus would arrive at our back door and peek inside, leaning his little paws on the glass to see if we were there with his walnuts. Chase tried really hard to get him to take a nut right from his (gloved) fingers, but Bingus never came that close. He did however stop fleeing into the tree when we came out. He just scurried to the edge of the porch while we made the deposit, and as soon as the door was closed he'd return to gobble them up. So if you see a massively over-weight half-tailed squirrel around, you can blame us.
Bingus has disappeared lately - we haven't seen him in a few weeks. I'm sad. I loved seeing him waiting for us at the back door. I would be worried but it's happened before, that he disappeared for a while. Maybe he is a she and she's off having this year's little squirrel babies. Who knows. I do hope Bingus makes a return though. I still have half a bag walnuts waiting.
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