The Squirrel Relocation Program

How I Spent a Summer Giving Squirrels Rides to the Park

The first house we bought was a 1930s fixer-upper with two enormous walnut trees in the backyard. They were beautiful trees. Slightly overgrown, but beautiful, and they shaded nearly the entire yard.

It made the entire back yard just a little bit nicer. With walnut trees come squirrels. Lots of squirrels.

At first, I didn’t mind them. Squirrels are cute, fuzzy, and endlessly entertaining. They’d chase each other through the branches, leap from tree to tree, and generally run amok across the backyard. They seem to have a highwire act connecting every tree in the neighborhood.

The problem was the walnuts.

In the first two years of living there, and despite having two enormous walnut trees, I don’t think I ever managed to get more than a handful of actual walnuts. The squirrels got the rest. They would sit in the branches chewing through them and raining shells down onto the yard.

Half-eaten shells. Broken shells. Sharp, jagged little pieces of walnut armor. Eventually, the backyard looked like someone had scattered natural caltrops everywhere. This became a problem for the dogs.

They’d charge outside, spot a squirrel, and immediately lose their minds. The squirrel would race along the fence. The dogs would race after the squirrel. There would be barking, chattering, and tremendous excitement. Eventually the dogs would come back with bloody feet.

So I raked, and raked, and raked some more. But there were always more walnut shells raining down. At any given time, I had maybe three or four squirrels running through the trees.

After a short discussion with my wife, something had to be done about the squirrels.

I didn’t want to kill them. They weren’t doing anything wrong. They were just doing squirrel things. Besides, they’d probably been living there before I arrived and, for all I knew, would still be there long after I was gone.

I decided to relocate them.

There was a nice park that stretched for about ten miles along the river, filled with trees—several varieties of walnut, plenty of pine—and, perhaps most importantly, plenty of people willing to feed the squirrels. It seemed perfect. If I were a squirrel, I would rather live there.

So began what I affectionately called The Squirrel Relocation Program. I bought a live trap and baited it with peanut butter. I would catch a squirrel, put the trap in the car, drive to the far side of the park, and release the squirrel into its beautiful new home. Problem solved.

Or so I thought. There seemed to be an awful lot of squirrels relocating to the park.

Because I’m a bit of a nerd about these things, I started keeping count. Five squirrels. Ten, twenty squirrels relocated.

I’d hear the snap of the trap and call to my wife, “That makes twenty-one!”

The dogs would lose their minds barking, seeming to take a certain pride in the fact that their human had finally managed to capture one of the creatures that had eluded them for years.

At some point, I began wondering just how many squirrels could possibly be living in two walnut trees.

By the time the Squirrel Relocation Program concluded, I had transported thirty-five squirrels to the park.

Thirty-five.

It worked, sort of. The population around the house finally became manageable. There were still a few squirrels running around in the trees, which was fine with me. I never wanted them gone completely. I just wanted the dogs to be able to cross the backyard without requiring first aid.

Summer days finally came, and every once in a while, usually on the weekend, I’d take the dogs down to the park for a walk. The park was full of people with bags of peanuts or popcorn everywhere.

Then I began noticing something else. There were squirrels everywhere. Dozens of them, multiple dozens of them. Those little brown squirrels were running across the grass, climbing trees, or sitting pretty on their back haunches while people fed them peanuts.

The park seemed to be experiencing some kind of squirrel invasion. I couldn’t help wondering if I might have had something to do with that.

As I was walking my dogs, things got stranger. Occasionally we’d walk past one and the little guy would stare at me.

Sure Maybe I was paranoid, but then he’d flick his tail.

Chatter.

Angrily.

Another squirrel would do the same thing. There seemed to be an uncomfortable number of pissed-off squirrels in that park.

And I started wondering…Do you know me?

Maybe they recognized the dogs. Maybe they recognized me. Maybe I was imagining the whole thing. But they kept staring at me!

The tail flicking and chattering started reminding me of a Alfred Hitchcock version of The Birds. I needed to make a mends.

I found myself apologizing. “Sorry, little guy.” And I meant it.

I’d tried to give them a nice new home, but apparently some of them weren’t particularly grateful.

By the end of summer, the squirrel population around our house was starting to increase again.

Dang it. One day at the end of fall, I looked up into the walnut tree and saw a familiar squirrel. There was no mistaking him.

One of the squirrels around our house had a mangled tail that looked as though it had been broken at some point and healed crooked. I’d seen him often enough that I’d given him a name. Lefty.

And there Lefty was. Back in his walnut tree.

That’s when it occurred to me that perhaps I should have done a little more research before launching the Squirrel Relocation Program. Turns out squirrels have a rather impressive ability to find their way home. Ten miles apparently wasn’t the insurmountable journey I had imagined.

It was more of a sabbatical to nature before returning to the city. Which raised another question. Had I actually relocated thirty-five different squirrels?

Or had I spent the summer operating some kind of complimentary squirrel shuttle service?

I looked up at Lefty.

He looked down at me.

For all I knew, I’d driven that little bugger to the park three times.

I couldn’t help smiling. I’d decided the park would be a better home for him. More trees. More food. People who would happily feed him. No dogs chasing him along the fence.

I’d made a perfectly reasonable decision. Lefty apparently had a different opinion.

Not all of the squirrels made it back.

But Lefty did.

— Dennis

Author Note

Dennis D. Montoya is a fantasy and literary fiction writer exploring themes of connection, memory, and resilience. He writes from the intersection of storytelling and healthcare, where empathy is both a craft and a calling.

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