Adventures with gray squirrels

What: My neighbor has a squirrel problem that I was happy to help with. She replaced the insulation on her chimney a couple weeks ago and thought that she had taken care of the problem, but apparently she was mistaken. On Friday I helped her chase out one of the squirrels. It turns out there were three more (much much smaller) gray squirrels still in the basement. I sealed a hole in the chimney, and coerced a couple into boxes then relocated them outside. The last young one definitely proved the most difficult. We set a havahart and baited with peanut butter, to no avail. Saturday morning a friend and I went into the basement and tried to catch the squirrel. It cornered itself in a stack of winter tires. It was growling pretty fiercely, but we managed to wrap the tire in a cover for the grill and then carry the whole thing outside. The video is the Great Releasing of the Squirrel. It was pretty much spring loaded and disappeared off along the fence line in a few short seconds.

Ecological notes: I had noticed the gray squirrels in my yard being a bit extra frisky in mid-February during some of the warmer weather. They breed twice a year so I assumed that this was breeding behavior. Their breeding affairs are a rather violent and complicated matter. Females often have scarred ears and necks from the males biting them during copulation. As females are only in estrus for a single day, promiscuity is the rule (a less charged word might be polygyny - many males mating with a single female). Ecologists like John Koprowski (who wrote some awesome stuff on squirrel mating behavior in the early 90s), suggest that females can be seen as a limited resource and are therefore highly prized and fiercely defended (like the black walnut in my backyard come September). A dominant male will thusly defend a female (or at least access to her) during the breeding season. Part of this is behavioral male-to-male aggression. But part is physiological.

During copulation the male will ejaculate and then secrete a gelatinous substance that hardens into a plug. The male has to then fend off other males until the secretion hardens (about 20 minutes), which effectively blocks another male's sperm (gross, right?). I would assume that the reason males have such gargantuan testicles during breeding season is to have such powerful blasts of semen as to break through other male's copulation plugs (aka mating plug, sperm plug, vaginal plug, or sphragis).

If the adult in Laura's basement had been an adult then she would have mated in that mid-February warm spell, gestated for a month and a half, then given birth to little naked helpless pups in the beginning of April. It'll be less than two more months before they're fully weened and ready to tackle the world. This would put them out on their own by about June 1st, so it's not unlikely that the group of four was a mother and her three pups.

Where: Latham Ct

Boxelder bugs

What: Full on outbreak of the boxelder bugs (Boisea trivittata). Coincides with the flower buds on the female boxelders (Acer negundo) bursting open.

Ecological notes: These population booms are (primarily) associated with female boxelder trees. But then again, a single boxelder tree is only mostly female or mostly male, meaning that on a single tree you can find both male and female flowers, just with one sex being in the vast majority (the fancy term is polygamodioecious). I heard the bugs before I spotted them. It's been so dry here that their rustling in the leaves made them sound much louder than they actually were. At first I thought (and hoped) it was a hibernacula of snakes waking up in the warm (60o) weather. Alas it was not.

Once I spotted the culprit (actually hundreds and hundreds of culprits) my interest was piqued. I'd watched some type of fly by the lake mating yesterday, with their rears touching and the boxelder bugs took the same posturing. The males are the larger of the two and have much brighter orange bellies. They more or less dragged the females over the rocks. Pairings seemed to last anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes or so.

Where: The bugs were lining the train tracks where North Ave crosses over (by the Donahue Sea caves). The whole stretch of the tracks between North and 127 is lined with boxelders, both male and female. The bugs were mostly along the rocks between the rail lines and the horsetails where it was the warmest.

Other notes: I didn't spot any eggs, but the females will deposit them in the bark of the boxelder. Once they hatch, these little guys have a gradual metamorphosis. They can't fly when they're young but develop wings as they get older (the young look like red aphids). Supposedly they eat boxelder seeds. I'd seen lots and lots of seeds this winter on boxelders that had little holes bored into them - I'm not sure if that was from these insects.