I'm Not Nuts!

After a long day of work yesterday, I came home to what I thought was a quiet, empty house since Eric was in Florida for work. I was going about my normal 'getting home' routine (going through mail, changing, etc.) when I heard a noise in the front room. Kind of a squeaking grunt and scratching. I followed the noise to the fireplace, which we don't use and is pretty well sealed up (it's an old school cast iron one). Then, something from within the fireplace heard me and got louder and more 'verbal'. Something fell down the chimney.

My first instinct - a squirrel. We've been pretty sure we had some in our attic over the winter and had recently heard some scratching in the ceiling. Our chimney was knocked down a long time ago, so when they re-roofed when Eric bought the house, they took it down the the attic 'floor' level. With Eric not coming home until LATE last night, I didn't know what to do since a cast iron fireplace was foreign to me - no clue how to work the damper.

Eric called after I shot him a text about the situation. Then he got me all worried, saying it could be a bat, or a rat, or a bird. The idea of a rat especially freaked me out... but we hadn't had issues with that type of vermin. I stuck with my squirrel idea and jumped online since I could do nothing else. I figured I could at least get a comfort level that it WAS a squirrel. So I looked up what sound they made and found all sorts of YouTube videos. Most of them sound pretty similar... but not quite the same sound I heard. My conclusion - it was scared to death in this deep, dark hole it fell in!

Well, Eric's plane was delayed and he didn't get home till nearly 1am. By this time, I was sure it was a squirrel and I had spent a lot of the night checking on it (going by the fireplace, makeing some noise and talking to it). You would've thought it was a child down a well the way I felt. Eric still wasn't convinced it was a squirrel, though, and threw out the idea of a rat again. I cringed. But he figured out the damper and got it open long enough to see it was right there, staring back at him. Once it heard the damper being opened, it moved from the corner it was culed up in - it saw light finally! And it was, indeed, a squirrel. It started making that noise squirrel make again when we were nearby and tried looking out the damper.

Once we propped open the damper, we thought it would jump right out. It didn't. So we tried coaxing it with some food and more of a ramp for it to come out on. Nothing. It would come look at us as we did things, but not come out. So we thought maybe we were scaring it by being right there. So we went across the room and up the stairs. It went silent at this point. Did it go to sleep?? As soon as we came back over to the fireplace, it'd make noise again.

After about 45 minutes of trying to coax it out, we decided we had to try to grab it. We assumed it would run deeper in the hole where Eric couldn't reach as soon as he put his hand in the fireplace. We were wrong. The squirrel practically walked on his hand and came out with no problem. It was just a little baby squirrel. No wonder he was so scared!

We put it is a bag to get it outside. We figured we'd put the bag on the ground and it would run as soon as it was opened. But it didn't. It didn't know what to do! I think this was its first exposure to the outside world - it was likely born in our attic! We grabbed the food we had put out and tried to feed it. Didn't even know what to do with that. But the kicker... it LOVED Eric and wouldn't let Eric walk away! It was so freaking cute! It bounced around his feet and just had no idea it wasn't supposed to be interacting with us. It even let us pet it and it wanted to be held!

So we took it out back, where we knew it would be safer (no walls to fall off of, no roads to run into) and again tried to get it to run away. Eric tried to walk into the house and it literally bounced right behind him, not letting Eric out ot its sight - just followed him around like a puppy! We finally got inside without it bouncing in right behind us and it sounded like it found a place to hideout on our backporch for the night. I wish we could've taken him in overnight and made sure it was okay and kept him safe. But we both knew it was wild, and even though it was young, it would figure things out. It didn't appear to be at all injured, as it bounced around. So it was for the best.

I poked my head out this morning to see if I could hear it or see it. It was either staying quiet because it was scared, or it had run off already. I watched all the adult squirrels fight over the remnants of our 'bait' from the night before, so I figured, just in case, I'd leave something on the backporch if it was still around. Hopefully its insticts kicked in or he found its mama in the early morning. But I'll never forget my baby squirrel!