critter magnet...

Last night I was on the couch thumbing through a knitting magazine while my husband was lamenting about his fantasy football loss to a friend on the phone and out of the corner of my eye I saw something move in the fireplace. I put down my magazine and went to look behind the glass doors along with the cats who had seen the same movement.

Another Southern Flying Squirrel. We know we have families of them in the attic, but since they are practically disease-free critters, we don't see any reason to oust them from their warm little suburbs. This little guy must have fallen down the chimney and crawled through the flue. We don't burn our fireplace because of structural damage in our chimney--thank goodness for him (We have ventless gas logs, but they stink!).

The cats were going nuts, trying to paw right through the glass, so we put the kitties away in other rooms while we opened the doors to attempt capturing the little fellow. Then, poof! he was gone. He jumped straight up through a little hole in the flue. We started to wonder if he was really trapped or just playing, but a few minutes later, plop! he parachuted back down onto the gas logs, just standing there looking at me.

I could hear the kitties tapping on the glass from time to time throughout the night, fascinated by the little snack on the other side.

We decided to see if he was still around today to make a better judgement call on his state of freedom. DH stopped by and saw that he was still there--asleep in the fake ashes, so DH cut up a little apple for him. He was so sound asleep (they are noctural animals) that, not only did he not notice the door was being opened, but DH actually nudged him with the apple and all he did was turn over and curl right back up. Talk about a heavy sleeper! We don't want to put him out during the day when he's so groggy, so we'll attempt to help him escape to freedom tonight. I'd like to take a picture of him but I don't know if that will happen, plus it would probably blind his little noctural eyes. The picture linked in the second paragraph is from the big escapee incident from the storage room--the lights were on then so I snapped a pic. Whee! Boy can they get around in a hurry! It was like a circus. Tickets are on sale for tonight!