[…] I waited for a blank noon on one of those Southern California days that are like a shallow bowl filled with almost nothing, a day when the main event turns out in retrospect to have been lunch at Donut & Burger. I placed my order at the walk-up window. Two young men sat at a table by the sidewalk, and once or twice I caught the humid brush-fire scent of burning cannabis. I ate in the truck with the windows down, looking at a vacant lot next door through a chain-link fence. The view seemed to say more than I wanted to hear about dietary anomie and the kind of day this was turning out to be.
But the grass beyond the fence parted, and a head poked up. Then more heads. The vacant lot wasn’t vacant at all. It was occupied by a prosperous colony of ground squirrels — Spermophilus beecheyi, named after the English explorer Sir Frederick William Beechey, who visited California in the H.M.S. Blossom 180 years ago. I did not know about Sir Frederick at the time. I knew only that these were ground squirrels and that this vacant lot was a ground squirrel subdivision and that I had just eaten a burger and a doughnut for lunch in the city of Pomona, Calif., which is named for a minor Roman goddess of tree fruits.
What surprised me were the burrows. They were mounded at the entrance, like the burrows you’d find in a Wyoming prairie dog town, and they somehow turned the vacancy of that empty lot into habitat. The squirrels stood guard on their haunches and raced from hole to hole. Almost instinctively I found myself imagining their tragic history, composing the saga of the ground squirrel in my mind. This was a relict population — the last of a dying breed, cut off from their kind by the unconscious savagery of human encroachment, their world now bounded by an auto parts store, a busy highway, the back alley of an apartment complex and the parking lot of Donut & Burger. The San Gabriel Mountains loomed impossibly distant for them. I wondered if they had been reduced to eating fries.
But you don’t have to read very much about Spermophilus beecheyi — never mind Sir Frederick William Beechey — to realize that California ground squirrels are nearly human in their adaptability. And like all creatures that are nearly human in their adaptability, humans consider them pests. Ground squirrels invade gardens and damage plants. They can carry bubonic plague. They destroy the eggs of ground-nesting birds. Their burrows can extend for dozens of feet.
I found myself telling a new story. The ground squirrels in that vacant lot are colonists, opening new terrain to an expansionist species, developing the site before the human developers can do so. Perhaps this is one of a series of vacant lots scattered across the Los Angeles basin, an archipelago of ground squirrels quietly shaping the earth to suit their needs. They watch the humans eating at Donut & Burger and know their time will come.
The squirrels reminded me of my last flight to Wyoming. I changed planes in Denver, and during the layover I watched a small flock of sparrows — five or six — that were living in one of the terminals. They betrayed no anxiety, no frantic fluttering toward the lights or windows. They behaved exactly the way sparrows do when they’re at home. They flew up to an architectural strut and preened, and then flew down to the carpet and hopped across the waiting areas, silently scavenging for food. I imagined a separate species of sparrow evolving over the years to come, breeding quickly, adapting precisely to the conditions inside Denver International Airport. […]
…from:
Letter From California: A Hidden Populace in a Vacant Lot
by Verylyn Klinkenborg in today's New York Times:
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