Saturday, November 28, 2009

What's the (Squirrel) Poop?

I was in Prospect Park today here in Brooklyn and noted that this is indeed the busy season if you happen to be a squirrel.

The furry little guys were out in full force digging through the leaves for acorns to bring back to the homestead for the winter. They were scrambling around madly and occasionally fighting with their fellow bushy-tailed rodents over the best nuts. A similar scene was playing out in malls all across America.

I'm not sure what path my brain took to get there, but the whole thing got me to thinking about squirrel poop. Nobody ever mentions squirrel poop. Dog poop, bird poop, cat poop, horse poop...they're all part of city life. Squirrel poop? Not so much, apparently. But squirrels must poop, right? They're animals, and mammals at that. They eat, they scamper about, they have butts. Ergo, they poop. So where is it? It must be there, right?

But nobody ever says, "Aw, fuck, I just stepped in squirrel poop!" And you never hear anyone holler, "I looked up and a goddamn squirrel pooped right on my head!" Are the poops just too small to see? Birds that are much smaller than squirrels manage to make their poop known. And I've seen some dogs running around that shouldn't be picking any fights with your garden variety squirrel.

Any scatologists out there that can enlighten me on squirrel poop? Google isn't exactly doing it on this topic. And I wanna know.

1 comment:

Mrs. Chili said...

I can't believe I'm actually going to answer this...

I am NOT a scatologist; let's make that perfectly clear. My knowledge of this particular, erm, topic comes from the fact that my mother, in a fit of maternal optimism, once adopted a baby squirrel that had fallen out of a tree in her yard and decided, rather than raise and release, to keep the thing. Yes, my mother was a weird one.

ANYWAY, my recollection of Squirrelski's elimination habits (and no, I had no say in naming the thing, so shut it) is that it pooped much like hamsters and gerbils and, if I'm remembering correctly, rabbits; little pellet-like things that were actually pretty easy to clean up. I think the reason we don't notice squirrel poop very much is that it's pretty innocuous; it's neither slimy nor viscous like bird shit, nor is it copious and stinky like, well, pretty much anything else.

I'm going to go wash my hands now.