Laughing Matters: The One About Sciurus Carolinensis

By Ryan G. Van Cleave |  Illustrations by Darcy Kelly-Laviolette
February 2021

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I don’t mean to frighten anyone, but someone has to say something, so here goes—Florida is currently experiencing a plague.

No, I don’t mean COVID-19. I mean the OTHER plague. 

I’m talking about squirrels.

The other day, I heard a noise that I swore was coming from the ceiling fan in my ground-floor home office. A kind of skritchy-scratchy thing that had me worrying about having to make a Lowe’s or Dan’s Fan City run to replace my 10-year-old Westinghouse 19” fan, and that got me freaking out since my hair hasn’t yet unkinked after the last home repair job that involved electrical work. (Who knew you had to flip ALL of the fuses in the garage to shut the power off? I mean, there ought to be a manual or something….)

Honestly, what surprised me was how the noise shifted from the fan to the smoke detector to the closet light like a Bermuda Triangle of home repair issues, point to point to point. I came to realize that the common denominator was Up. My neighbor had a raccoon in his attic last year, so I figured maybe this was the sequel to that end. I went to the garage and got out my ladder to crawl up into the attic (not an easy proposition—we have 15” ceilings out there because giants lived in this house before us, apparently). I flicked on my flashlight’s high beams, stirred through the ocean of pink insulation, and found…nothing. 

No raccoon tracks, no rat dropping, no rabbit chew marks. Nothing. But I just knew some critter was up to no good.

I rushed back inside to read all the right critter-in-your-attic online articles and watch too many overly-enthusiastic-anti-rodent YouTube videos that all mostly boiled down to one thing—call a professional. Yet I found no signs of anything wrong up there. Just those noises, which were now totally gone. So, what the heck did I need a professional for, right?

I decided it’d be prudent to at least check the outside of the house to see where any creature might or might not have ninjaed into my hopefully varmint-free world. I crept around the yard, broomstick in hand, just in case. Not that I’d use a broom as a weapon or anything—I didn’t have the courage for such a thing. But I’d sure wave that Dollar-Tree broom at any creature in a threatening manner like I was a scarecrow whose pants were literally on fire. I could do that. I come from a long line of non-confrontational, animal-fearing adults.

I thought I was safe. It was all in my imagination. I was in the clear. Then, to my utter horror, I saw it—an Easter Gray squirrel the size of an Elf on the Shelf, just standing on its hindlegs on my roof not twenty feet away. Gloating. Lurking. Menacing. 

It stared at me. I gulped.

It hissed. I whistled my broom once through the late-afternoon Florida air.

That’s when I saw the Other Squirrels. At least three of them. Maybe more. Probably a LOT more. One in the neighbor’s sycamore. One atop the next-door pool cage roof. One near the water behind my house. They all looked at me and chittered angrily. Frighteningly. Squirrely.

It was total Squirrelmageddon. So, I dropped my broom and ran.

Once I locked myself inside my car in the driveway, I called my friend from Chicago. He’d had squirrel problems before, so I figured he’d know what to do. Those city squirrels couldn’t be any tougher to deal with than Florida squirrels, I hoped.

“They were like a team!” I shouted into my phone. “A horde!”

“But they didn’t DO anything?”

“Well…not yet.”

He shamed me into going back to assess the situation. Carefully, stealthily, I crept into my backyard. To my surprise, I saw that the same aggressive squirrel was still on my roof, standing there on the edge like he owned the place. I looked at the other squirrels and got to thinking that THEY were thinking exactly what I was thinking. 

“That squirrel is going to jump!”

Like a pirate walking the plank, the roof squirrel did exactly that—he took the plunge. Only here’s where things got weird. Instead of splatting onto patio bricks, that maybe-not-so-suicidal squirrel spread its limbs wide, showing stretchy batwings like some kind of horrific squirrel demonspawn, and that thing cackled with squirrely laughter and it FLEW! It just zipped across my well-weeded lawn, soared over the stretch of water behind my house, and shot off into the dusky distance. 

The other squirrels were gone—they had already booked it. I tossed down my broom, let out a shriek, and charged back inside, where I sprawled on the living room floor, muttering, “The horror! The horror!”

Florida Wildlife 1

Ryan Van Cleave 0

A few days later, my younger daughter said she THOUGHT she heard a mouse in the garage. “I don’t care,” I told her, shivering at the thought of yet another face-to-face confrontation with Mother Nature. Let’s face it—she had my number. “He can have the garage. I rarely use the car anyway.”

“But Dad,” she pleaded. “That’s where all the frozen pizzas are.”

She was right. Our upright freezer was out there, loaded from its frosty bottom to icicley top with Tombstones and Breyer’s. 

And that’s how the Van Cleave family went on a non-pizza, non-ice-cream diet at the start of 2021.

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If you’ve had your own terrifying encounters with Florida wildlife—bonus points for armadillo wrestling or a roseate spoonbill divebombing—please let me know ASAP. I’m compiling evidence for a tell-all book that will reveal the REAL story of what’s going on here in the wilds of the Sunshine State. That or it’ll be a new diet fad book called The Florida Wildlife Cleanse.

In either case, please send me your contributions at SPAM@SceneSarasota.com. Seriously. I want to know!