The Squirrel and the Walnut

Like every yahoo who has a yard and a couple of big trees, we have squirrels. They do provide a certain amount of entertainment and generally are harmless unless they decide to take up residence in the walls of the house---which the little suckers can happen. They like a good nut, and will rifle the sun flowers seeds until they can hardly move. Rather gluttonous, it would seem.

In watching them, day in and day out, one learns a few things about the rascals. Like humans, they have certain things they can not leave alone, and it would seem they will put their lives on line to achieve a certain end. I had noticed before that Walnuts have a certain fascination to them. I will also admit I to have a fondness for them and collect them every year and set them back.

For me it is partly the smell of a freshly fallen, yet green, Walnuts. They have an odor I find unique and intriguing. a richness, an earthy pungent smell that has some special attraction. I do know that as a youngster in the 50s our family would go out into the Baraboo hills and collect them along with Butternuts. It was a good childhood time, a time of all of us being together and a time before my mother died young. It is a fond memory. We shelled them later in the year and they went into cookies, cookies our mother baked.

Apparently the squirrel has the same affinity, maybe not the childhood thing, but the attraction to the odor. In their case, it would seem to be one of genetics for I doubt they were ever trained to seek them out. The reason I say that is our squirrels have never seen a Walnut tree---at least I do not know where. However, take a walnut and put it anywhere and they will have it in hours, and that includes buried in a flower pot under ten inches of soil. The odor must be so  intense to them that they can seek it out at great length.

I had lost nuts to them before, in the garage and in the shed. Leave the door open and the entire cashe will be gone in hours with hulls scattered hither and yon--and that yon is a big deal. Well, I was tired of the looting so I put the nut collection on the back porch a few weeks ago, behind the freezer, and that is a closed porch. Two days ago for a few hours, during a warm spell, I left the door open. That is all it took, for in that time they entered the porch and began rifling the nuts on the spot. Some they ran outside and ripped apart on the steps. Tell me, how could they have known the Walnuts were there and why would they put their miserable little lives on the line to get the damn nuts? They have to be like heroin, and that drive has to be in their genes. I will wager that if a handful of walnuts were placed on the kitchen table, they would be willing make a run for them.

I think there is a message here, maybe a message about humans and our drive to consume every damn thing on earth even at the expense of our own lives. There has to be a baked-in-the-cake drive, a possible dysfunctional gene that causes us to go just too far for that one last nut.