fascinating scientific research into everyday language for you, assemble the individual pieces of the puzzle so you can see the big picture, and sprinkle in a few observations of my own to bring it all to life. I hope this will help you see the animal world around you and the species described in this book, not as mindless automatons driven by an inflexible genetic code, but as stalwart souls and lovable rascals. And that is just what they are, as you will discover for yourself when you take a walk in my neighborhood with my goats, horses, and rabbits, or in the parks and woods where you live. Come on. I’ll show you what I mean.
1
SELFLESS MOTHER LOVE
IT WAS A hot summer day at my forester’s lodge deep in the woods near Hümmel in the Eifel, a mountain range in Germany. The year was 1996. To cool off, my wife and I had set out a wading pool under a shady tree in the garden. I was sitting in the water with my two children, and we were enjoying juicy slices of watermelon when, all of a sudden, I became aware of a movement out of the corner of my eye. A rusty-brown something was scampering toward us, freezing for an instant every now and then as it advanced. “A squirrel!” the children cried in delight. My joy, however, soon turned to deep concern as the squirrel took a few more steps and then keeled over onto its side. It was clearly ill, and after it had taken a few more steps (in our direction!), I noticed a large growth on its neck. It looked as though what we were dealing with here was an animal that was definitely suffering from something and might even be highly infectious. Slowly but surely, it was approaching the pool. I was on the point of gathering up the children and beating a hasty retreat when the menacing advance resolved itself into a touching scene. The lump turned out to be a baby wrapped around its mother’s neck like a furry ruff. The baby’s stranglehold, along with the shimmering heat, meant the squirrel mother could only suck in enough air to take a few steps before falling over sideways, exhausted and gasping for breath.
A squirrel mother cares for her children with selfless devotion. When danger threatens, she carries them to safety in the manner I have just described. She can end up totally spent, because she may have as many as six tiny tots to tote one after the other, each one clasped around her neck. Despite her devotion, the chances of her little ones surviving are low, and about 80 percent die before they are a year old. Although the rusty rascals can avoid most enemies during the day, death stalks them at night while they are sleeping. When darkness falls, predatory pine martens creep through the branches to interrupt the squirrels’ dreams. When the sun shines, the danger comes from agile hawks threading their way through the trees on the lookout for a tasty meal. When a hawk spots a squirrel, a spiral of fear begins. And I mean that literally, for the squirrel tries to escape the hawk by disappearing to the other side of the tree. The hawk banks steeply to follow its prey. In a flash, the squirrel disappears to the other side of the tree again. The hawk follows. Moving at breakneck speed, both animals spiral around the trunk. The nimbler one wins—usually the little mammal.
Winter, however, is more devastating than any predator. To make sure they go into the cold season well prepared, squirrels build drays. They anchor these spherical nests between branches high up in tree crowns and fashion two separate exits with their paws so they can escape any uninvited guests. The nest is made mostly of small twigs, and the interior is cushioned with soft moss that helps conserve heat and provides a comfortable place to sleep. Comfortable? Yes, animals value comfort, too, and squirrels don’t like twigs poking into their backs while they’re trying to sleep any more than we do. A soft moss mattress guarantees a restful night.
From my office window, I regularly see squirrels pulling this soft green material from our lawn and carrying it high up into the branches. And I see something else, too. As soon as the acorns and beechnuts tumble to the ground in fall, squirrels gather these nutrient-rich packages, carry them a few yards, and bury them. They hide food caches to make sure they have food over the winter. Instead of going into true hibernation, they spend most of their winter days dozing. In this state of winter lethargy, they use less energy than usual, but they do not shut down completely like, say, hedgehogs. Every once in a while, a squirrel wakes up and gets hungry. Then it slips down the tree and looks for one of its numerous caches. And it looks, and looks, and looks. At first, it’s funny watching the little animal trying to remember where it’s hidden its food. It burrows a bit here, digs a little there, sitting upright every once in a while as though taking a break to think. But that doesn’t help. The landscape has changed considerably since the fall. The trees and shrubs have lost their leaves, the grass has dried up, and worse, everything might now be covered in cottony white snow. As the frantic squirrel continues its search, my heart goes out to it. Nature is ruthlessly sorting out who will live and who will die. Most of the forgetful squirrels—primarily this year’s young—will not live to see spring because they will starve to death. Then I find small clumps of beech trees sprouting in the ancient beech preserves. Baby beeches look like emerald-colored butterflies fluttering at the ends of slender stalks and they usually grow alone. They gather in clumps only in places where a squirrel has failed to retrieve the nuts it stashed, often because it simply forgot where they were, with the fatal consequences I have just described.
I find the red squirrel to be a prime example of how we sort animals into categories. Their dark button eyes are adorable, their soft fur is a beautiful reddish color (there are also some that are brownish black), and they pose no threat to humans. In spring, young trees sprout from their forgotten food caches, so you could say they help establish new woodlands. In short, we are kindly disposed toward them. We avoid thinking about their favorite food: baby birds. From my office window at the lodge, I am also privy to their predatory raids. When a squirrel scales a tree in spring, consternation reigns in the small colony of fieldfares that raise their young in the old pines along the driveway. The little birds, which are related to thrushes, flutter around the trees, chittering and chattering, trying to drive off the intruder. Squirrels are the birds’ deadly enemies, because the little mammals calmly help themselves to one downy chick after another. Even nesting cavities offer the baby birds only limited protection. Armed with long, sharp claws at the end of slender paws, squirrels can fish even supposedly well-protected nestlings out of the tree hollows where they are hiding.
So are squirrels bad or are they good? Neither. A quirk of Nature ensures that they arouse our protective instincts, and so we experience positive emotions when we see them. This has nothing to do with them being good or useful. And on the flip side of the coin, their habit of killing the songbirds we also love doesn’t mean they are bad either. The squirrels are hungry and must feed their young, which depend on nourishing milk from their mother. We would be thrilled if squirrels met their need for protein by gorging themselves on the caterpillars of the cabbage white butterfly. If they did this, our emotional balance sheet would come out 100 percent in the squirrels’ favor, because these pests are a nuisance in our vegetable gardens. But caterpillars are also young animals, and in this case they grow up to be butterflies. And just because the caterpillars happen to like the plants we have earmarked for our dinner doesn’t mean that killing butterfly babies counts as a net benefit for the natural world. The squirrels, meanwhile, are not the slightest bit interested in what we think of them. They are too busy surviving and, while they are at it, making the most of life.
But back to maternal love in these little red rascals. Are they really capable of experiencing this emotion? A love so strong that a squirrel mother places a higher value on the lives of her offspring than she does on her own? Isn’t it just a case of a spike in the hormones coursing through the squirrel’s veins that triggers preprogrammed protective behavior? Science has a tendency to reduce biological processes to involuntary mechanics, so, before painting such a dispassionate picture of squirrels and other animals, let’s take a look at maternal love in our own species. What happens in a human mother’s body when she holds an infant in her arms? Is maternal love innate? Science would say yes and no. Maternal love itself is not innate, but the conditions necessary for developing this love are.
Shortly before a child is born, the hormone oxytocin flows through the mother’s system, which helps her develop a strong bond with her child. In addition,
