sqwabb

I heard a strange, new, sound today, I was in a back alley, collecting my bottle- and can-shaped nuts and berries, on my way eastward to cash in at a bottle depot. The sound stopped me in my tracks. Kind of a click, click, click -- screech! I thought it was a bird, but it wasn't. It was a squirrel on an overhead transmission wire. Both an unusual sight, and sound. I stalked the squirrel with my new Nikon camera, and considered what might be up with this little shrieking rodent.



Click, click, click, screech! Click, click, click, screech!

• Was it a mother squirrel, warning off threats to it's young brood?


• Was the poor thing mortally injured?


• Was this what a squirrel sounded like as it was being electrocuted?


• What did cooked squirrel taste like?

It was slowly moving along the wire -- stopping, and making it's noise for a while, then dashing a few feet along the wire, and stopping, and repeating the noise, and so on. I guessed that it had gotten onto the overhead wire by scampering up a wooden utility pole -- an easy thing for a squirrel. It didn't occur to me it couldn't go back down the same way, Finally, it reached both a point on the wire, and a decision. It suddenly leapt towards a tree, made a branch, and was gone in the foliage.

An older, wiser fellow at the bottle depot confirmed what appeared to be the case -- it had gotten onto the wire but couldn't see a way to get off.

"That..." the fellow told me, "was the sound of a pissed-off squirrel." Click the images to enlarge them.