Sitting in the crook of the large, rather gangly, elder tree in a neighbour's garden, the squirrel was staring into space, bleating out its miieeeoorrrl, call over and over again. I've never heard this noise before.
A plaintive mewling took me to the end of the garden a couple of days ago. At first I thought a cat had caught a bird or had cornered a fledgling. As I got closer I realised it was coming from a tree and wondered if some strange seagull was lost in East Dulwich. But no, it was a grey squirrel. It was singing.
Sitting in the crook of the large, rather gangly, elder tree in a neighbour's garden, the squirrel was staring into space, bleating out its miieeeoorrrl, call over and over again. I’ve never heard this noise before. Unlike birds, whose songs are well known and documented in books, CDs and on the web, animal noises seem less likely to be described.
Even my favourite mammal book, Beast Book for the Pocket, by Edmund Sanders, has very little to say. According to Sanders, the grey makes an "indignant scolding, chur-urr". Not my meowing. Sanders' sometimes witty text usually can't be beaten. The book starts with an entry on 'man', Homo sapiens, complete with physical description, habits, behaviour, dental formula, skeleton, calls and distribution map of the British Isles. But it was written in 1936, only a few years after the grey squirrel started to spread widely through the country. Maybe he hadn't heard many.
On holiday in Canada last summer, we heard and saw many different types of squirrel. North America seems to be the evolutionary home of these animals, with at least a dozen in British Columbia and Alberta alone. The noisiest were some of the ground squirrels, 'piping' from outside their burrows beside the railroad tracks at Field in the Rocky Mountain's brilliantly named Yoho National Park.
My squirrel's sorrowful noise was very different from the happy piping in Canada. I've now identified a British grey squirel 'song' on the internet. It's similar, but not quite the same. Perhaps the squirrels hereabouts have a south London accent.
See more comments...
