Yesterday was a very windy day. A co-worker was walking to the office when all of a sudden something big fell out of a tree right in front of him...a squirrel's nest! As soon as it hit the ground, a squirrel ran out of it, so he stopped and picked up the nest and leaned it against a tree by the office. He called me to come out and see it, so I went out and joined the rest of our guys who were standing around looking at it, checking it out. There was a smaller squirrel still in it! So we all backed off and as we did, we saw the mama squirrel making her way back to the nest. We watched her as she jumped on top of it, then disappeared (all but her tail!) inside. She backed out and had the little one in her mouth...she turned and ran off. One of our guys watched where she was going and she immediately ran up another tree and put the baby in another nest!
We thought the nest was empty, but still didn't mess with it. To our surprise, not more than a minute after depositing her baby, she was back at the old nest...and...pulled out another baby! We were all shocked because we didn't see anything else in it! We watched her run up the other tree and drop the baby in the nest and were all just in awe of the whole thing.
Here's the weird part - she kept going back to the old nest...over and over again. We're not sure if she was taking pieces of it up to her "new" home or what, but when I came into work this morning, the nest was unrecognizable as a nest. She had tore it completely to pieces.
A couple things amazed me about that mama squirrel...she didn't spend any time at all looking for a new place for her kids - she IMMEDIATELY took them to an old nest, so squirrels must know where all the nests in the area are and if they're occupied or not (there were 3 nests much closer that she didn't go to). And she had no hesitation, no fear of us at all, either time she came for her babies. We gave her space, but there were 4 of us no more than 10 feet away. She didn't care. She had a mission.
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