By Suzanna Leigh
I had a conversation with a squirrel the other day. She was a native “Douglas” squirrel, brownish with a brownish-red underbelly. She seemed to defy gravity as she perched on the side of the shed, hind feet up, her head down closer to my eye level. She looked directly into my eyes and chirped at me for a long time. I stood entranced, clippers in hand – I planned to rescue the garbage cans from the ivy – and tried to reassure her.
I told here she is welcome here, that we mean her no harm; she continued to chirp at me insistently. What did she want? Sadly, I don’t speak squirrel. Finally, I asked if she wanted to show me something. Instantly, she dashed away and disappeared by the ivy-covered cans.
I think she didn’t want me to cut back the ivy. Perhaps she has maple seeds stashed there for the winter?
I am convinced that wild animals are much more aware of us than we are of them, that they recognize and remember certain people, and that they somehow intuit our intentions.
My first clue that the wild ones watch us intelligently was one morning several years ago, when I had the school. We often walked the block to Crow Beach. You know, the beach where people park to drink their morning coffee, where teens sometimes gather after school, and parents take their toddlers to play in the sand. We would look under the rocks for tiny crabs no bigger than a child’s fingernail, play pirate ship on the big driftwood root system, or collect shells to sort and classify later. Then we would sit together on a driftwood log and eat our snack.
One day, I found a polished piece of moon snail shell – lavender, pink, and tan inside. I admired it for awhile, then I put it down. It was snack time. We handed out napkins, cheese slices, and apple pieces packed in orange juice. Oh dear, one child dropped her cheese in the sand! I gave her another, then I picked up the sand-covered cheese and tossed it toward the gulls at the water’s edge. One of the gulls snatched up the cheese as quick as a wink!
Soon, it was time to head back to class. As I bent down to help a child with his boots, PLOP! Something landed in the sand beside me. I looked up to see a gull fly off, then I looked down to see what went plop. It was the same moon snail shell I had admired earlier!
I think the gull was saying thank you for the cheese.
Then there was the time Tim Baer and I were doing QiGong on that same beach. As Tim and I did “cloud hands,” we noticed something odd in the water over by the Standard Oil dock. A fin? We walked to the dock to get a closer look. Something large seemed to be struggling under the water. Was it a sea mammal caught in an escaped fishing net? Was that blood in the water?
We stood on the dock, wondering how we could help. It didn’t seem safe for either us or the animal to approach it in Tim’s canoe or my dinghy. We watched prayerfully, holding it in the Light as Quakers do, until it got free. It was a sea lion! Moments later there were ten of them swimming around the dock. Inviting us to play? We must have watched them for half an hour before we needed go home for breakfast.
As soon as we said goodbye, the sea lions gathered together and swam off a ways. The leader turned to us and barked ten times, once for each sea lion in the group, and they all swam off.
When I was a child, I was taught not to “anthropomorphize” animals. They don’t have any thoughts, only instincts, I was told. They are just dumb animals. I think that is a mistake. I think we need to listen to the animals. Perhaps they are teachers, as the Native Americans believe. At very the least, they are our neighbors.
