I realize that it has been some time since I have last posted, but now that the Christmas season is over and the colds have subsided I'll be around more. So prepare yourselves for more poorly editted, but hopefully entertaining stories.
This is a lil story about one of my most unique pets. His name was Skippy, a flying squirrel. He enjoyed eating peanutbutter and just about anything else...."Wait. Wait!" I hear you shouting. "A flying squirrel?" Yes siree, that's what I said and what I meant, a flying squirrel. Let's go back to the beginning. I was in high school with my assembly of other pets, when my friend Dan from down the road called me and said that his aunt had just captured two flying squirrels that were abiding in her attic. (Apparently if you shine a flashlight in their eyes, it stuns them, making them easy to wrangle.) Dan's aunt didn't want to kill them, so she gave them to Dan to take care of. I don't exactly remember why he gave me one of them, but I do remember bringing him home and thinking to myself, " What should I keep a flying squirrel in?" So I used my crazy MacGuyver skills and attached my old parakeets' cage to the top of a vacant aquarium with some duct tape. I admired my handy work for a moment and put the small box containing Skippy into his "new home". It didn't take him long to get used to his set up, and I was surprised how quickly he tamed down. (The flying squirrel is the only wild animal I know of that is said to make a good pet in a wildlife book, which was my reasoning to Mom why I should keep him.)
Skippy loved peanut butter and sunflower seeds. Mom bought me a 10 pound bucket of sunflower seeds which lasted Skippy a long time. Skippy loved to eat. I would coax him out of his little plastic sleeping container by putting a glob of peanut butter on my finger. He'd peek out and grab my finger with his two front paws to make sure I wouldn't steal it back from him. Then Skippy would lick it all off. He never bit me even when I first got him.
They say that if you get a flying squirrel young enough they will sleep in your pocket. Now Skippy was older when he came to me, so he never got this tame. I'd take Skippy out and let him run around some, and as long as I had his plastic sleeping container he'd go in and let me put him back in his cage.
The funniest memory of my flying squirrel was that he was too fat to fly. Flying squirrels don't actually fly, but they have s stretch of skin that attaches between their front and back legs which allows them to glide to a distant tree. Now when you eat too much like Skippy would do, gravity tends to affect you more. So if he was startled suddenly he'd look to a distant couch and try to glide, only to plummit more downward than forward. It was funny, but he was so small it never hurt him.
I only have a few Skippy pics but non on a digital camera, so check out some online photos to see more of the flying squirrel dynamics
http://www.flyingsquirrels.com/Images/Photos/Hampson/index.html
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