In late October, Barb Haney got a phone call. Workers had been demolishing a house near Erie, New York, when they encountered a nest of baby squirrels in the chimney.
Haney, the director of Erie SPCA’s wildlife department, was immediately worried.
“It’s kind of hard to get them ready to release back into the wild in time before the snow comes here in Western New York,” Haney told The Dodo. “So when we get calls like that about baby squirrels, we’re always like, ‘Oh boy, that’s a tough one.’”
Shutterstock/Erin Cadigan
Haney knew the best thing for the squirrels was to reunite them with their mom.
“Mother squirrels usually have a backup nest. They’re pretty great like that,” Haney said. “So you can sometimes reunite them even if that first nest is destroyed.”
There was just one problem: Haney had no idea where the mom was. Still, she and her team decided to try and find her.
Facebook/The SPCA Serving Erie County, NY
Shortly after their rescue, Carine Mardorossian, a wildlife rehabilitation expert at the SPCA, drove the baby squirrels back to the site of the demolished house.
“We put the babies in a little crocheted hat that we have at the SPCA,” Mardorossian told The Dodo. “I was a little bit concerned that the moment [the mom] came, she would be freaked out by the hat because it wasn’t natural.”
But Mardorossian quickly realized she had nothing to worry about.
As soon as Mardorossian had placed the squirrels on the ground, a large squirrel appeared on the trunk of a nearby tree. Slowly, the squirrel began to inch closer and closer to the babies.
“Obviously, it was the right squirrel,” Mardorossian said. “It didn’t take one minute.”
The mother squirrel took one of the babies up the tree. Then she came back for another. And another.
But she did leave one squirrel behind. Mardorossian said she believes it’s because the mother realized this squirrel didn’t actually belong to her.
Facebook/The SPCA Serving Erie County, NY
“She could tell which ones were her babies,” Mardorossian said. “She literally took all her babies and then left the one that wasn’t hers.”
The remaining squirrel is now in the caring hands of wildlife rehabilitators. As for the others, Haney said she knows they are in the best place possible — with their mom.
“We have to trust that mother squirrels are much better at taking care of baby squirrels than we are,” Haney said. “We want to leave nature to be nature.”
