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If after my sincere warning you still choose to attempt to interact with squirrels in this manner, you do so at your own risk.
Hi! My name is Gregg Bassett, and I am the president and founder of The Squirrel Lover's Club.
I’ve been an animal lover all of my life. I had my share of pets as a child and a few more as an adult. As of June 1990, I’d had one cocker spaniel, four cats, two chameleons, one parakeet, one turtle, one mouse, two hermit crabs, two boa constrictors, four tarantulas and a tank full of guppies as pets at one time or another in my life; and that doesn’t include all the stray cats I’d taken in temporarily or the numerous garter snakes, frogs, etc. I’d befriended but never kept as pets.
However, there was one kind of animal I always thought was cute and very interesting, squirrels! All my life, I’d been exposed to brown fox squirrels and gray squirrels (as I’ve always lived in the Chicago area), but I did not know much about them.
In October 1988, my wife, Kathy, and I drove to the Grand Canyon. While we were there, we saw a little brown fox squirrel coming right up to people’s feet and begging. That was the closest I had ever been to a squirrel and the first time I’d ever seen a squirrel behave like that. This really got my attention.
About a year and a half later, sometime in the spring of 1990, I was in my enclosed back porch when a gray squirrel with a big black nose came right up to the window by me. I tapped on the window and she (I discovered it was a female at a later date) put her nose up to the glass. When I opened the sliding glass door, however, she ran off, but kept stopping and looking back like she was still curious about me.
Less than a week after this incident, Kathy and I were a couple of blocks from home on one of our daily walks when I saw a brown fox squirrel on a fence looking at me. It came down off the fence and came toward me but wouldn’t come any closer than about two feet from me. We resumed our walk and less than half of a block farther two brown fox squirrels came out of a yard onto the sidewalk in front of us and stood looking at us. One of them stayed where it was and watched as the other one curiously approached us and very cautiously sniffed the toe of one of Kathy’s shoes. Then the two of them ran off. It was at that moment that I made the decision that would change my life forever. I decided that I wanted to get a squirrel to take a nut out of my hand.
Our next door neighbor has a bird feeder in his back yard. He fills it with sunflower seeds which squirrels love. So I had no trouble finding squirrels. I had Kathy buy a bag of walnuts and I then proceeded to approach the squirrels around the bird feeder with my hand out and a walnut in it. I spent about an hour or two a day for two or three days doing this without any success.
Then came Baldy. His story is told under Meet Baldy . For a few days it was just Baldy. Then came Frisky, Slitty, Figit, and so on. Pretty soon we switched from walnuts to peanuts because it was getting too expensive to keep feeding this growing number of squirrels walnuts.
That was over six years ago. Since then, we have befriended around six dozen squirrels; some of them brown fox squirrels and some of them gray squirrels. From time to time, we lose some which are replaced by new ones that come on board. We usually have anywhere from six to fourteen around at any given time. Also, as time has gone on, both the squirrels and I have gotten braver in our relationship to where some of them chase after me, grab a hold of me, jump on me, climb on me and even take peanuts out of my mouth.
In the process of all this, the squirrels succeeded in making me fall in love with them. They’ve gone from being just one of the many kinds of animals I kind of like, to the top of my list. I’ve learned a lot, too. I used think they were smart, but not as smart as dogs or cats. Now I know they’re at least as smart as any dog or cat; maybe smarter. I used to think they had no personality. I know better now.
In January of 1995, we read a couple of newspaper articles about a woman in Kansas who got in trouble with the law for saving a baby squirrel’s life and keeping it as a pet. I got in touch with her and found out that there are alot of squirrel lovers around just like us. A little research showed us that there were clubs for dog lovers, cat lovers, bird watchers, etc. but none for squirrel lovers. So, we decided to start one. On August 6, 1995 The Squirrel Lover’s Club was born.
Gregg Bassett
President
The Squirrel Lover’s Club
