True squirrel story: Out where I grew up in Edmonds, we had a yard that had a lot of trees and therefore many squirrels. When I was nine, my mom was out working in the yard. Suddenly - plop! - a squirrel falls out of a nearby tree and lands at her feet. He's quite dead. Of course, this kind of freaks her out, but she soon realizes that he's expired. Then for some reason, she's suddenly afraid that this late squirrel has rabies or some other dread disease. What does she do? She puts him in a plastic bag, sticks him in the garage freezer and calls our neighbor, who works as a pathologist at some Seattle hospital. He agrees to do necropsy on the squirrel in a month. It actually ended up being two months. So for all that time, we had this poor dead squirrel that fell out of a tree in our freezer. Eventually, our neighbor did the necropsy. The cause of death? Advanced old age. He estimated that the squirrel may have been as much as 10 years old. That little guy was possibly a year older than me! Well, that's what I call a full and rich squirrel life. Denny Park can't promise its squirrels such a long life, but it does have some very nice trees.
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