New York Sqirrels Are Evil (Updated)

Normally, I like squirrels just fine. They're cute and fluffy and I like the way their little tails twitch. They're cuddly-looking little critters...from far away.

In Colorado, where I grew up, we had Fox Squirrels:

Photo by Sylvia Murphy

Fox Squirrels are supposedly the biggest squirrels in North America, but the Eastern Grey Squirrels here in NYC somehow seem much bigger:

Image: Photobucket.com

Case and point: here in NY, there is squirrel hunting season. Your daily bag limit is 6. I will repeat that: during hunting season, you are allowed to kill 6 BAGS worth of squirrels PER DAY. I wish I had known this in dealing with my own squirrel problem. (Correction: Boyfriend has just informed me that the daily bag limit of six means 6 squirrels, not 6 bags. His exact words were, "You're so cute with your not knowing about killing animals.")

A little background:

Last April, Boyfriend and I moved into a new apartment. When I say, "new apartment" I mean that it was new to us, as in, we have never lived their before. To say the apartment itself was new would be ridiculous. From day 1, living in this apartment has been...oh what's the word? Shit-tacular. Literally, the day we moved in shit started to go wrong. But, I digress this post is not about that, this post is about squirrels.

We have a courtyard in the middle of our building with some grassy/dirt area and shrubs. Living in the outer boroughs means there are a lot more trees than in Manhattan, and that means a lot more "wildlife" around us. During the summer it is really hot and humid, and so we had to invest in a second air conditioner for our apartment so we could have one in the living room and one in the bedroom.

Early one Saturday morning, not long after we installed our new A/C unit in the bedroom window, I woke up to a violent scratching sound. I'd been having a somewhat odd/scary dream, so I woke up sort of freaking out thinking something was trying to get at me through the wall or some nonsense. Once "sleepy brain" cleared up, I realized something WAS trying to claw inside. At first I thought it was a bird pecking at the A/C and I freaked out even more (I'm afraid of birds). I walked over to the window and stared at the little movement flexing against the accordion screen. I peeked out the curtain above the A/C and saw a bushy grey tail. Aaaw, it's a squirrel, but HE'S INTERRUPTING MY SLEEPING-IN ON A SATURDAY!

My solution to the situation was to poke the accordion screen to scare the squirrel away. This only intrigued him and made him scratch at it harder, so hard that he was starting to rip a small hole in the screen. I started banging on the window. This commotion woke up Boyfriend who told me to go back to bed because I was dreaming. The squirrel eventually got annoyed with me and ran away. I found some gaff tape and did a little patch-job on the A/C and went back to sleep.



After this day, nearly every morning around 7am we would wake up to the rustled scratching of that damn squirrel at our A/C unit! After a couple of weeks of this, I came home from work one evening and went to the bedroom to change. To my horror, I found that the squirrel had finished the job he set out to do:

I flipped out. I suddenly became very paranoid. Boyfriend was still at work, and I was home alone with a squirrel loose somewhere. I grabbed the broom and a saucepan and slowly walked around our entire apartment sing/screeching and banging the pot waiting for the squirrel to leap out at me like Clark Griswold in Christmas Vacation. If any of our neighbors were watching or gave half a shit, I'd be locked away. After I was satisfied that the squirrel was not in the apartment, I jimmied a patch for the A/C unit-turned-doggie-door-for-critters out of gaff tape, packing tape, and cardboard.

Tres ghetto chic, non?