It Ain't Tree-sy. Ha.

Today’s stories are not one of regal squirrely accomplishment, but rather of the silly failures that a squirreler encounters. Sometimes, the nest of the squirrel you are looking for is a couple centimetres out of reach from standing on the ground, but is also located in a skinny, short tree with no branches. This results in you having to “firepole” up the tree, which is physically exhausting and causes you to grunt and sweat and struggle, but you need to cover such a miniscule vertical distance that your fellow squirreler dies laughing at the spectacle. Sometimes you leave the door of the data hut open and later find that the “camp squirrel” has entered and appears to be sabotaging the files on the head technician’s desk. Sometimes you lose your handling bag (intuitively, these are used to handle the squirrels we trap) on grid, come back to camp to get a new handling bag, rush back out into the forest so you don’t get behind on your traps, and find that you’ve lost your second handling bag already.

Of all these stories, the worst and best incident happened this week. The crew was doing a peanut butter add/remove day rather than trapping, meaning that we were adding peanut butter to buckets strung up on the middens of lactating female squirrels and removing peanut butter from the buckets of all the other squirrels. ‘Cause if you don’t got babies, you don’t get PB. That is the way of squirrel camp. So anyways, we were taking care of all those buttery peanuts, when something tragic happened. One of the ropes holding a bucket up broke. Who would handle this insurmountable difficulty? Who would be the one to step up and rise to the challenge? Who in this whole wide world would have the gumption and audacity?! None but I. So I am scampering up that tree like an adept young black bear, like a skilled lumberjack, like Spiderman. As I crest the top of the tree, the crowd below gasps in awe. They turn to one another, jaws dropped, I-can’t-even hand gestures abound. I do a cartwheel IN the tree. Just for yuks. Then I tie the ropes together in a double-hitch-back-whatchamacallit knot, knot for the faint of heart in the knot-tying world, let me tell you. Just as it seems things can’t get any more exciting, I am headed back down the tree.

All eyes are trained on me.

Down I come, like a smooth waterfall running down into only the locations of the least resistance, flowing down the tree.

I am within the last foot of the return downwards, and I am ready to triumphantly land on the ground in a perfect triple backflip, at which point the crowd will climax into applause. As I prepare my dismount, I realize that there is one minor inconvenience preventing me from executing my planned acrobatics: my pant leg is hooked over a mildly intrusive nub on the tree trunk. I attempt to dislodge. There are no branches beneath my feet, I am hugging the trunk like a koala, except a koala that is bizarrely cemented in place with only a foot of vertical distance from the ground. What are you doing koala? How does this benefit you? Time passes. The crowd falters. I attempt to dislodge.

“Why aren’t you coming down?”

A small pause as I try to assemble the words to explain my predicament. And then, I begin to laugh and bumble through the words “I’m stuck” laughterlaughterlaughter “on my right pant leg” gigglegigglegiggle “I can’t get down”

The crowd (which incidentally turns out to be two coworkers who were occupied with a different task as I was climbing and likely did not notice my ascent) begins to laugh as well, and one girl, Gaelle (better known by me using the nickname Kyle), begins to circle me looking for where I’m stuck. The more sarcastic one, Alec, instead of trying to help, begins a diatribe: “Why aren’t you coming down Sarah? It’s one foot off the ground, really, we need to get going. Just come down, jeez louise,” etc, etc, until I am laughing so hard I can barely manage to continue to hold onto the tree, nevermind explain where my leg is caught. All I can say is “no, no” in response because I can’t just come down, and Kyle thinks I mean no not the right pant leg so she is searching on my left side and I repeat “THE RIGHT PANT LEG” and she is dying laughing and finally finds where I’m caught and removes the several wrinkles of pant that were securely tucked inside that goddamn nub and finally I fall to the ground and I am FREE. With an enormous hole in my pants.

And these are the circumstances that lead to shameful patchworking in the evening time at Squirrel Camp.

This smiling and grimacing experience brought to you by:

Sarah “Klondike Kate” Nason

P-P-Professor Sq-Sq-Squirrel

I have become a Jr. Squirreler. I hope one day to get my Acorn Badge and graduate to a Sr. Squirreler, but this is far in the future and will require much training and mental preparation. For now, I wander (AKA trip and generally bumble my way through) the forest wearing my khaki vest equipped with peanut butter and listen for the sweet calls of my scansorial friends with feeble, uneducated ears.

I didn’t just have a strange outdoorsy fever dream – I am a field technician in the Yukon Territory for the summer this year, working for a project that studies squirrels in Kluane National Park. The study, called the Kluane Red Squirrel Project (KRSP), has been running since 1987 and collects pedigree data for a huge population of squirrels. We monitor four grids that are ~1 km² each, amounting to a total of about 5000 squirrels. One of my friends (let’s call him Burt) took a Community Ecology class last year that referred to such a project with the acronym LTER: Long Term Ecological Research. This acronym is so pretentious and unnecessary, and my doubt that it actually gets used in practice is so great, that I will persist in using it throughout this post.

So with this kind of LTER there is a lot of training associated. I started work on May 1^st, and since then I have learned such a huge quantity of information in such a short time period that my brain feels weighted with the authority of this knowledge. I now know how to set tomahawk traps, handle live squirrels, navigate a grid, use radio telemetry equipment, climb spruce trees, tag ears, identify and interpret squirrel behaviour, perform stomach palpations to determine pregnancy status, express nipples of lactating female squirrels (yes, I know how to milk a squirrel), handle all the data generated by these procedures, and most importantly, play with baby squirrels (called pups). Playing with the babies is of critical importance, and all senior staff at KRSP recognizes this.

I have also encountered a few minor hiccups along the way in my squirrel adventures. To start with, an adult squirrel died as I was handling it. This apparently only happens once or twice a year, but it happened to me on my second day of independent work. This is a rare moment in my blogging where I will allow seriousness: it was really sad, and very shocking. We hold the squirrels in handling bags in order to read their ear tags to identify the individual and feel the stomach if it is a female to determine pregnancy status. I was doing a stomach palpation and the female I was handling had been quite stressed, but seemed to be calming down. Little did I know, she was most likely entering cardiac arrest. I finished my palpation and put her down on the ground to record the information quickly, and she seemed suspiciously still. I checked her immediately, and found she was dead. I radioed a senior member who came along and although she comforted me to assure me it probably wasn’t my fault, she also informed me that the squirrel had a litter and those babies would die too.

So THAT was great. But the next day would be better, right? You already know that since I said that, something worse is coming. I need to be a little less cliché here. Ok, let’s try this: the next day was an improvement, because I didn’t kill any squirrels. I myself had a fancy brush with death though, falling out of the next tree I attempted to climb. This has only happened to two other squirrelers in the history of the project. I was completely uninjured, because I was lucky enough that both branches I was supported by broke at the same time. I slid all the way down the tree and landed neatly on my bottom. I then proceeded to shake for the next 20 minutes and ceased climbing trees. I haven’t climbed a tree since, so hopefully this has not become a deep-seeded (ha, ha, ha) fear in my heart. The thing is though, overall, I prefer that my heart continues to beat. Such are the risks of LTER, however, and we simply have to face them.

But there is one thing that makes all of this worthwhile: baby squirrels.