sonora2sonoma

Columbia was a lively place to inhabit in the 80s. The St. Charles Saloon, or the “Charlie,” as we locals called it, was a mere five-minute stroll from the house where I lived.  The Charlie was the hub of a vibrant social life graced by the offerings of a varied collection of talented musicians. The revered band, Fiddlestix, performed routinely on weekends, wowing and, at times, mystifying the hordes of tourists who passed through town on their weekend escapes from suburbia.

Of the many adventures I had there, one of the more interesting memories from my time living in Columbia involved not musical escapades but a cross-species interaction I observed between a squirrel, a cat and a flock of about a half-dozen woodpeckers.

The scene where the event unfolded was a telephone pole that stood at the edge of an open field across the street from my house. My roommate, Mike, and I happened to be sitting on a couch on the front porch one summer afternoon when a young and inexperienced gray squirrel decided to scale the pole in the hopes of raiding a woodpecker nest that clung to the base of the upper crosspiece near the pole’s top.

Our perch allowed us a great view of the business that unfolded before our eyes that afternoon.

When the hapless squirrel began its climb, it set in motion a series of events in which the squirrel got much more than it bargained for.

The prospective purloiner’s push into the birds’ domain did not go unnoticed by the woodpeckers, who quickly sprung to alarm and began swooping perilously close to the squirrel, attempting to dissuade it from further advancing its position.

After the birds had made several sorties, punctuated by pauses to permit their brethren to parry, the squirrel, appearing to have second thoughts about the efficacy of his enterprise, began descending the pole in retreat. By this time, however, the action had caught the attention of my cat, Jack, who had positioned himself at the base of the pole in order to snatch the squirrel on its descent.

The squirrel, comprehending the threat lurking beneath, now began climbing upward again, only this time to escape the cat, who had started his own climb upward to close the gap between him and his prey.  As the beleaguered beast ascended, the birds renewed their aerial assault against him with newfound vigor, taking turns as they repeatedly dive-bombed him, forcing him to inch downward just as the cat was narrowing the gap between them.  

This push-and-pull continued, the birds carrying on their coordinated aerobatics while the squirrel grew more frantic as it repeatedly retreated downward from the threat above only to have to then flee upward to escape the peril menacing it from below. At one point, it nearly fell to the ground. Unnerved and exhausted by being beset by foes on all fronts, both feathered and furry, the misguided mammal appeared entirely out of its element.

As the encounter drew on, the birds began to show fatigue too, tempering their tandem thrashing with longer and longer periods of rest, their tongues drooping beneath their beaks as they gasped for breath. Jack also began to show signs of tiring, but not sufficient to put him off his pursuit.

Lost in a limbo of its own invention, the repressed rodent, now harried, helpless and hopelessly hemmed-in after a full forty-five minutes of flak, finally appeared to realize that the cat posed the greater risk. It resumed its ascent once again, only this time hunkered-down and humiliated, no longer interested in the woodpecker’s nest; now, solely intent on seeking shelter from the cat, birds be damned.

The similarly worn-down woodpeckers offered less resistance than before, allowing, albeit grudgingly, the squirrel to inch closer to their territory, but only to the top of the lower of the pole’s two cross-pieces, where it huddled, flattening itself as best it could against the corner where the cross-piece met the pole, two feet short of the nest, remaining there while the birds fluttered about it authoritatively, surveilling it regularly lest it attempt further intransigence.

At that point, Mike and I grew tired too, and left the battle to the birds while we adjourned to the ‘Charlie’ to recount the saga we’d just seen over beers and nachos.

Tim Konrad

January 30. 2021