I am in the habit of leaving my window open, so that I can always get plenty of fresh air. Yesterday I had seen a squirrel running across the balcony along my window many times. A couple of times she even peered in. Once she had entered while I was away and typed a bit on the computer and chewed up a piece of notepaper. Perhaps I should have known.
Yesterday two of the guys in the corner office, Gilles and Mario, observed a squirrel carrying some pieces of paper in her mouth and putting them in a waste paper basket sitting on Gilles' balcony. Alas, I only discovered this today, or I would have shut my window last night.
This morning I opened Gilles' window to get the trash can and see if my papers were in it. As I did so, the squirrel climbed out of it and fled! I found that she had made a nest out of all that paper. It was a lot like the nests that mice make out of newspaper if you keep them in a cage. This is why I believe the squirrel is a she: I think she was probably making a nest to have babies in.
The pages from my notebook were in reasonably good condition, considering what they had gone through, so I pulled them out of the trash can. Meanwhile the squirrel had returned to the balcony, apparently concerned about the disappearance of her nest. I became worried that there might already be babies in the nest and checked, but it was empty. We decided to return the nest, and Weidong and Mario donated some newspapers to compensate for the papers that I had removed. Then we put it back onto the balcony.
Soon the squirrel returned and spent at least a good half hour sniffing around the can, and occasionally peering in over the top. Weidong recognized her as a squirrel he had fed nuts to regularly last year. She can easily be recognized, since her left ear is a bit damaged. Eventually she disappeared. I hope she finally got back into her nest.
When I returned to my office, I discovered that she had been typing on my keyboard as she worked. The window she typed in was running a calculation that presented progress reports about every twenty minutes, so I was able to get some idea of how long she worked, and when. She worked over a period of at least an hour, probably more and possibly much more. She finished her work no sooner than around 9:00, which is right before I arrived in my office! So she probably went to work when she got up this morning, and was only interrupted when I came to work myself.
Hopefully tomorrow Weidong will bring his digital camera to work and take pictures of our squirrel.
That is all there is to my squirrel story so far. I'm hoping that she'll have babies and we'll get to see them. Then there will be more to the story. I have to go now. Goodye!