The pair of squirrels that used to live in the Valley Oak tree in the yard below mine have gone AWOL. I can’t blame them. Their habitat was destroyed one rainy day when my neighbors had their trees trimmed. I was at a memorial service, and when I returned, surprise! Their Valley Oak (the reason I bought this house 13 years ago because I look into its branches from my kitchen window) had been hacked up, a third of the limbs gone. The crooked Live Oak next to it (they grew into each other) was thinned out and had many limbs chopped off, as indicated by the telltale round scars of fleshy white.
It’s been ten days and the squirrels have not returned. I miss watching them play as they ran up and down the tree limbs, jumping from tree to tree, occasionally running down my fence to grab some discarded bird seed under the feeders. I used to give them their own pile of seeds on the fence rail.
The birds still come to the three feeders (the middle one now empty because the rats favored it). The two on each end are harder for the rats to access. How do I know I have rats? My Jack Russell tells me so. We’ll be sitting around the living room at night, and she’ll squeal and run out the door. She often waits by the patio slider, watching for them to come out after dark to feed.
Back to the squirrels. Did they have a nest in the live oak, now removed with the tree limbs? Did they move to another yard? It seems like a cruel thing to do to wildlife on a cold rainy February day. I know why the tree got trimmed. Three years ago, the neighbors, who have a bowl-shaped back yard with the house at the bottom of the bowl, hired the gardeners to enlarge their usable space by cutting away the hill and installing seven-foot high retaining walls. It was near the end of the pandemic. I know this because the Jack Russell dug under the fence and escaped into their yard. I had to go down there to retrieve her, and what I saw was heartbreaking. The oak, which was decades old and grew on the hill, had the new retaining wall just a couple of feet away from the trunk. A huge pile of tree roots was in the corner of the yard. It looked like a third of the tree’s hill had been cut away. I knew the tree would suffer.
Now, three years later, the dead limbs have been removed and the tree will fight to survive. In the meantime, I planted a redwood tree in the same sight line from my kitchen window. Someday that Vally Oak will be cut down because it will be mostly dead, and my redwood will take its place as something green to look at while standing at the kitchen sink. All of my houses have had kitchen windows with a view of greenery, even the first one in the Bay Area with a window that faced the street.
I miss you, squirrels. I get why you moved on, but come back and visit every now and then. I’ll even put bird seed on the top rail of the fence if you’ll stop by and say hey.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 