They may be cute, but don’t pet or feed your local squirrels.
Residents in the North Bay learned this the hard way this month after squirrel attacks in one neighborhood sent at least three people to the emergency room.
Joe and Marie Ayoob were examining a newly-trimmed tree in their San Rafael backyard earlier this month when they first laid eyes on a friendly-looking squirrel.
“She kept on coming towards us, and we thought that was kind of interesting, because they usually run away,” Ayoob recalled.
The squirrel jumped up on the ledge of the couple’s wooden fence, close enough for Marie to snap a photo. Then, things got dicey.
The squirrel began gnawing at the fence, chipping away big chunks of wood.
Joe yelled for it to scram and swatted at it with his baseball cap, his wife said.
“She jumped on his head, scratched his ear and then landed on his leg,” Marie said. “He pushed her off, and she finally scurried away.”
The couple went to the emergency room to make sure the scratches weren’t dangerous. Squirrels don’t carry rabies, she was told, and Joe was sent home with a clean bill of health.
But the next day, the same squirrel, they said, returned to the scene of the crime — to chomp at a mop lying in the Ayoobs’ backyard — and, it seems, terrorize other neighbors in the Lucas Valley neighborhood north of San Rafael.
A flyer posted around the neighborhood, notifying residents of a “very mean squirrel,” warned, “This is not a joke five people have been attacked.”
Joan Heblack was out for her usual morning walk last Sunday when she felt something heavy glom onto her leg.
“I didn’t see it come from anywhere, I wasn’t by any trees or bushes — I was walking in the middle of the street,” she told KQED. “I was trying to bat it off, but it wouldn’t get off. It just clung more, and I was swinging my leg around and screaming.”
She said she jogged home, told her husband and went to the emergency room to get the bleeding scratches on her legs examined. Heblack was prescribed an antibiotic for her wounds.
Heblack said that she had heard from a neighbor that a day before her attack, another woman was bitten by — they believe — the same squirrel.
“I heard about that incident, and it happened on the [same] street, but I just thought, ‘It’s not going to happen to me.’”
Heblack said she was fine after the incident, and returned to her regular walking route that day.
Animal experts in Marin County say that a squirrel gone wild isn’t actually as unusual as people might think.
“We’ve seen this happen before,” said Alison Hermance, the director of marketing for WildCare, a wildlife hospital in the North Bay.
“This is almost certainly a young squirrel that had probably fallen from his nest, landed on the ground [and] was found by people who took him in and tried to raise him themselves,” she told KQED.
The squirrel likely got used to being fed and cared for, and ended up confused when it returned to the wild.
“As he got older, got more squirrely, the animal either escaped from the caretakers or they decided to let him go … and the squirrel doesn’t understand what has changed,” Hermance said.
She said the squirrel doesn’t immediately understand why others aren’t feeding it, and will likely take matters into its own hands.
“The squirrel will jump on the person, clawing at them, biting them, desperate for the food that they are expecting a human to provide,” Hermance explained. “It’s actually a really sad situation.”
And, she said, a clear “lesson of why you shouldn’t feed wildlife.”
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