Goodbye Mr. Squirrel

Yesterday I hit a squirrel with my car. I was about a block from my apartment when a squirrel came out into the street in front of me. He was actually a little ways away from me when I first saw him and I was not going very fast, so one would think that he should have been pretty safe, but no, not with Katie and her Prius on the hunt. In my defense, it was mostly the squirrel’s fault. As I approached, he was about one fourth the way across the street and as I neared, he took a few steps back towards the relative safety of the curb. But then he froze and glared at the car in what seemed to be an attempt to anticipate my exact route. Finally, the rodent either incorrectly calculation my car’s direction, or made a suicide attempt, because he ran out into the street right in front of me.

Squirrels aren’t the biggest animals on earth. A hippopotamus is a lot bigger, nevertheless I could actually feel a slight bump as I passed over the squirrel. I immediately hoped I had killed him instantly. I figured he would not be uninjured, and I dreaded the thought of looking into my rearview mirror and seeing a half-crushed squirrel alive and thrashing around in pain in the road behind me. There was no car following me so I stopped as soon as I had coasted far enough to see the squirrel’s body appeared in the rearview mirror. He was not moving so I pronounced him dead.

There are a couple of things that given a little time can dispose of a squirrel carcass lying on a side street. One would be crows. Another would be the cumulative effects of a few hundred car tires. So I did not go back to remove the body.

If I had hit some seldom seen species like a fox, I would have felt worse. I would have felt a lot worse had it been a skunk that went into a scent gland defensive mode directed at my approaching car.

I have wondered if those squirrels that do poorly at handling auto traffic will become less involved in the species reproduction due to natural selection, and so somewhere in the future there will be fewer squirrel deaths via the automobile. I hope so. They are kind of cute animals, that is, when they are alive.