Zitat des Tages über Eichhörnchen / Squirrels:
Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.
Daddy had a farm - cows, pigs, OK, a big garden, OK? We did live off the land, and then we would supplement all that with whatever we could kill or catch. Whether we'd kill squirrels, deer, duck, or caught catfish or brim, that was what went on the table.
We may never find a way to live in suburbia with deer as we do with raccoons, say, or squirrels. So for this reason, it's very important that we make sure always to save enough wild or open land so that they can live in their normal manner.
I used to think I was ugly. I thought I looked like a camel. A person who doesn't love themselves, they will see anything that pops up on their face. I've seen squirrels, I've seen a bird, and I've seen all kinds of animals on my face. But that is the result of self-hate. I've learned to say: 'You know what? I am a beautiful black woman'.
One reason, doubtless, why squirrels are so bold and reckless in leaping through the trees is that, if they miss their hold and fall, they sustain no injury. Every species of tree-squirrel seems to be capable of a sort of rudimentary flying, at least of making itself into a parachute, so as to ease or break a fall or a leap from a great height.
All us Youngs could throw. I used to kill squirrels with a stone when I was a kid, and my granddad once killed a turkey buzzard on the fly with a rock.
I'm happy to feed the squirrels - tree rats with the agility of point guards - but in fair weather, they frighten my finches. They leap from snowbank to porch to feeder and stuff their cheek pouches with chickadee feed.
I just need green. I need to wake up and see grass and squirrels. I don't want to see skyscrapers.
So often we talk about saving the planet, but what we really mean is to save the planet the way it is, so we can live here. So that is can sustain us. Because the planet doesn't need to be saved. It doesn't care if all the squirrels, elephants, and trees die and there's just a couple of amoebas floating around at the poles.
The thought of eating rabbit and squirrels doesn't appeal to me. And that was on our table quite often as a kid. In your uppity restaurants, they serve a lot of rabbit. But I just can't help but think of Peter. And deer, I can't go there, because of Bambi.
There is something very human in this apparent mirth and mockery of the squirrels. It seems to be a sort of ironical laughter, and implies self-conscious pride and exultation in the laughter.
I go to Union Square Park, mostly to take care of squirrels.
People and squirrels are very different. Most people will not argue that. But I find that there is one situation in which they're very similar. And that is: when I am driving towards them in my car. Then they're kind of hard to tell apart - especially if the human is kind of hairy.
I gave away two dogs years ago because I felt guilty at not being able to give them the time and attention they deserved. I now regularly feed an army of squirrels and wild birds around our house.
I don't think we should see the world of books as fundamentally separate from the world of the Internet. Yes, the Internet contains a lot of videos of squirrels riding skateboards, but it can also be a place that facilitates big conversations about books.
My wife and I have so much fun when we travel and find anything... like stray cats and squirrels.
I have always brought home stray animals - everything from squirrels to wild rabbits to foxes and turtles.
The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels.
It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day.
I remember New York in the '80s as a place with vacant lots that would eventually give over to nature. Weeds would grow up, squirrels would move in. That entropy is gone now. It's too expensive to let a vacant lot go natural.
I'm not really out in the world all that much. I mean, I live with no phone signal, in the hills surrounded by trees, and I have, like, a mom and two baby deer that come by all the time, and my dogs and the squirrels are in a full-on feud every morning.
I was just different. When the other kids gravitated to football or basketball, I went fishing and skating. I was into trapping animals, pheasants and squirrels. Not only was I trapper, I was a taxidermist.
In my garden, which is a big garden, I have one part that is my bird garden, and every morning, 365 days a year, they get buckets of food - for the birds, for the squirrels, the chipmunks and the turtles in the summer.
I fell asleep once while washing dishes. I hallucinated prolifically - like, squirrels knitting whole sweaters! It was like my dreams inserted themselves in my waking life.
Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.
If you like affection, then about one in three squirrels makes an excellent companion.