Happy Squirrel Appreciation Day!

National Squirrel Day

In honor of Squirrel Appreciation Day on January 21st, here are some special quotes from my adapted book, Walden-ish, about squirrels. Also, scroll down to see a squirrely illustration and text excerpt from my vegan children’s book, Alien Earth.

Walden-ish

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“The true agriculturalist will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish their labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of their fields, and sacrificing in their mind not only their first, but their last fruits also.” - Walden-ish (Thoreau/Lilleth, adapted from Walden)

“At the approach of spring, the red-squirrels got under my house, two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they only chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them. No you don’t—chickaree—chickaree. They were wholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a strain of invective that was irresistible.” - Walden-ish (Thoreau/Lilleth, adapted from Walden)

“All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manœuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his “trotters,” as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on them,—for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a ballet dancer,—wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance,—I never saw one walk,—and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, they would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up their clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time,—for no reason that I could ever detect, or that they themselves were aware of, I suspect. At length they would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the top-most stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where they looked me in the face, and there would sit for hours, supplying themselves with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about; ’til at length they grew more dainty still and played with their food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from their careless grasp and fell to the ground, then they would look over at it with mistrust, as if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent rodent would waste many an ear in a forenoon; ’til at last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than themselves, and skillfully balancing it, they would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for them and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate;—a singularly frivolous and whimsical little being;—and so they would get off with it to where they lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various directions.”
Walden-ish (Thoreau/Lilleth, adapted from Walden)

“And regarding squirrels, what is the character of our gratitude to these rodents, these planters of forests? We regard them as vermin, and annually shoot and destroy them in great numbers because perhaps they sometimes devour some of our corn, while they plant the acorn in its place. In various parts of the country, an army of grown-up children assemble for a squirrel hunt. Would it not be far more civilized and humane to recognize them once per year by some significant symbolical ceremony, to honor the part which the squirrel plays—the great service it performs—in the economy of the universe? Some may say that the squirrels and jays only produce forests by accident, but who can say for sure that it is not on purpose to serve the greater good?” - Walden-ish (Thoreau/Lilleth, adapted from Walden)

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Alien Earth

And a squirrely excerpt from my vegan children’s book, Alien Earth:

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