I was sitting here typing and minding my own business at almost midnight when there was some thumping and clattering on the side of the house.

To set the scene, my work space is a spare bedroom upstairs. For a fire escape, we have an opening window with a ladder under it that leads down to the yard.

I got up, turned off the light, and went over to the window. The moonlight was very bright on the snow, and right below the window, maybe a foot away from me through the glass, standing on the ladder, was a squirrel -- which I got a brief look at before it shot off to the side, across the side of the house. The clattering I had heard was the squirrel climbing the ladder.

Huh, I thought. We have two kinds of squirrels here, red squirrels and flying squirrels. Flying squirrels are nocturnal, and red squirrels (I always thought) are only out during the day, but the outline of the squirrel on the ladder looked just like our regular, common red squirrels. Maybe, I thought, the moonlight is so bright it didn't realize it was night.

More scrabbling. I called Orion in to see it. We were peering around trying to find it when there was a sudden --

--- swish --

-- of something pale gray plummeting past the window STRAIGHT DOWN. It looked like a dirty snowball. There was a loud TONG! as it hit the fuel tank under the window.

We looked at each other. I opened the window to see if I could see where it had gone, just as it came charging up the ladder straight at the window.

Squirrel: AAAAAA
Me: AAAAAAA

It veered off 90 degrees to the side and shot across the wall, and I slammed the window, because squirrels in the house I Do Not Want.

Okay, so pale gray is very much the color of a flying squirrel, and red squirrels are, well, red. It really did look just like some sort of animate falling snowball. I got a flashlight and went outside and shone the light up at the side of the house, and was able to see it well enough (in the brief glimpse I got before I swung the light away to avoid blinding the poor thing) to tell for sure that it was a northern flying squirrel.



Not my photo, obviously. But to illustrate. You can tell the difference from typical other kinds of North American squirrels by the huge eyes. (They are honestly the cutest things I have ever seen in my LIFE. The first time I saw one, I thought it looked like some kind of baby lemur.)

I didn't want to bother it with the flashlight, and Orion talked me out of leaving food out for it because we really don't want to encourage it to try to get into the attic or something, so we went in to let it calm down and fly away in peace.

But I still keep (guiltily) laughing thinking about the sheer physical humor of the little gray snowball going ZOOOOOM past the window. I guess it was trying to climb the house and slipped. I just keep picturing it doing - well - this:



- but entirely vertical due to bad timing. THIS IS NOT HOW YOU FLY. NATURE, WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS.

Anyway, it was very much a Falling Squirrel tonight. It definitely didn't seem to be hurt, so I hope it's okay and goes on to have a nice life in our winter woods.