The Squirrels in the Chimney Story

Oh, I have a really crazy story about squirrels in our chimney to tell you today.

While we thought that we had provided a safe path of escape for our chimney squirrel and had concluded that he was gone, this weekend we began to smell something in the basement that made us think otherwise….Ugh! That poor squirrel starved to death in our chimney. We tried everything to get him out safely, but he kept running back into the chimney, away from us. It was all very sad.

The odor of rotting dead animal is the worst smell b/c not only does it stink, but the thought of what’s causing it is so repulsive!

Alan, while I was not at home (thank goodness!), decided to simply reach up into the chimney and remove the source of the smell (dead squirrel).  So……..Alan put on a good pair of thick gloves, opened the flu, and reached up in there to retrieve our friend, but as he reached up his hand seemed to feel more than just one dead squirrel……

Instead, Alan discovered in our chimney, not one, not two, but three older dead squirrels.

They had been rotting there for so long that the hair had already rotted off.

Yes, you can take a break to go barf if you’d like……

Alan put the squirrels in the garbage bag and felt back in there until he found our recently deceased squirrel, pulled him out and disposed of him as well.  It was so sad and so disturbing at the same time.

We think we have the chimney fixed so that this will not happen again.  However, the basement STILL stinks.  Can anyone explain that?  I don’t understand!  The basement was odorless until a few days ago, but being pregnant I am particularly sensitive to pungent smells and find myself getting behind on laundry due to my reluctance to go down there.

Several days later, the foul rotting squirrel smell STILL did not go away!

Alan donned his gloves and went back to digging. Y’all, there were like five more in there. What!

But we learned something valuable about squirrels from all this.

Squirrels are family animals, looking after one another. There will be no squirrel left behind, one after another, they will come for each other.

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Now I am off to do some cooking!  We have a yummy dinner planned for this evening, and yet my picky little eaters still think sweet potatoes are yucky…..*eye rolling* tisk tisk.