If you've ever been in DC you know we're overrun by the cute little critters.
The WaPo has a feature on them -- they were scarce commodities around here until the government decided at the turn of the last century to re-introduce them and protect them from hunters. Strange for the government to help a species known to hide their nuts while the government puts their nuts in plain view, but, I digress.
However, one fact surprised me. Do you know the average lifetime for a squirrel? 11-12 months. A year. And the average squirrel has 4-8 babies before she dies.
So what I don't understand is -- who's hiding the dead squirrels? Sure you see them dead on the road occasionally, but as many squirrels as there are and as clumped together as they seem to be in city parks you'd think we'd be awash in squirrel cadavers. You'd think someone would raise a stink about it.
Perhaps, like elephants, they wonder off to a dying field, a place yet to be discovered in Rock Creek Park. If the park can hide the remains of a high profile murder victim from a DC police dragnet (Chandra Levy) surely it's adequate to hide the hollow where squirrels go to die.
Or, maybe the rats eat them. Perhaps the politicians, in a rare act of public service, clean them from the streets on the way home from their fundraisers or trysts with young interns. But then...I repeat myself.
All I know is, when it comes to squirrel deaths in DC...there's something fishy going on.
1 comment:
The various scavengers enedmic to ecosytems probably pick them clean qickly, and the fragile bones are of course easily crushed and lost in undergrowth, leaf litter or other ground cover. Some predators and scavengers, of course, swallow the bones and end up depositing them concealed by other matter.
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