Love ‘em or hate ‘em, squirrels are enterprising, industrious and forward-looking animals. With winter approaching, they get busy finding and storing food for the months ahead. It’s very natural.
But a North Dakota man got a bit of a surprise recently when he discovered that a particular red squirrel co-habitating on his property had used his Chevrolet Avalanche as a winter food cellar. Inside, in every nook and cranny possible in the engine bloc and elsewhere, were nuts. Many nuts. 150 pounds worth of walnuts, to be precise. That’s 68 kg for us Canadians.
This is the figure Bill Fischer gave after extricating the walnuts from all the places the squirrel had found inside the second-generation Avalanche, a model renowned by the way for being a versatile carrier of items, thanks to its Midgate system.
In this case, though, the squirrel hadn’t contented itself with filling the cargo area with its bounty. No sirree. Bill Fischer found nuts all over the engine bay, including around the radiator and the battery, and many more in and under body panels.
Fischer estimated it must have taken the squirrel four days to transport so many nuts – one by one - from the tree on the property into the Avalanche’s various orifices.
It may have taken as long for Fischer to remove the nuts from the vehicle. He had to dismantle most of the front end, including the front grille, fenders and bumper. Even then, he could not get at all of them, with some simply out of reach and destined to keep rattling around in the recesses of the Avalanche until they rot. The man told the Grand Forks Herald that “I still have some rolling around the frame, rail wells as well, that I can't get at.”
