| From West by Northwest.org Voices of Spencer Creek One Early Harvest By Edie Self Oct 28, 2004
A Squirrel's Song While there is still the leafy green While there is still the sunlight warm I will work and play unseen My young ones joyful borne. The night winds blew cool Winter is on her way I will gather before cruel Blow the winds of winter's day. - traditional Spencer Creek Valley squirrel song One of the pleasures of hand-watering around my yard is watching the wildlife. There are lots of squirrels. They plant trees. Several years ago I decided to allow a little filbert to grow in the front flower bed--under conditions. I get to decide how big it grows. So, for the past few summers, I've been pruning and shaping it into a "little nut tree" of my very own. Last winter, my little nut tree bloomed. There were at least half a dozen catkins depending gracefully from the ends of the branches--a promise of nuts to come. I knew I wanted to let the squirrels have the nuts; they planted the tree, after all. I don't know enough about the lifespan of squirrels to know whether the planter might be the reaper or not. So comes the morning in the third week of August, that finds me out front, hose in hand, a delighted witness to the end of the harvest. The squirrel was so intent on his project that he barely spared me a glance before dismissing me as irrelevant to his quest. By the time I tuned in, he was nearly finished. One pair of nuts, still bright green in their lacy wrappers, hung at the end of one branch. The squirrel ran up the trunk and all the way to the end--of the wrong branch! what was he about? He zipped back down, all the way to the ground, then went up the same side of the tree, up a different branch,to find nothing. Again, down all the way, a quick turn to go up, and again all the way to another dead end. And so on...and so on. He must have made ten or twelve trips, methodically working his way all over that tree, until he finally hit the bonanza. He clipped those nuts, positioned them securely between this teeth, and took off like a shot up the nearby spruce. And that was it. All those filberts, the first batch for this little tree, have been harvested by, I hope, at least a relation of the sower of the seed. And I continue with my watering, full of joy at witnessing the end of the act. What next will appear on this stage? What a wonderful world it is! Copyright ©2004 by Edie Self Edie Self is a member of the Spencer Butte writer's group. You may find her work at West By Northwest.org: Wash Day for Robins by Edie Self The Sunnyside of Spencer Butte: Two Winter Tales and Birding on the Butte by Edie Self Summer at Grandma's by Edie Self More on the web: For more information and delight about Squirrels visit Backyard Nature.org and the story of Mistletoe, One Year in the Life of a Gray Squirrel by Jim Conrad. © Copyright 2000-2004 by West by Northwest.org |
