I have written before about my fondness for small woodland animals like squirrels [1], and this fondness has been well-developed, along with a respect for small animals that is perhaps rare. As a child I grew up in the country outside of Plant City, Florida, and it so happened that my grandparents were immensely fond of oak trees (as well as mulberry trees) in their property, and so it happened that there were a lot of squirrels who enjoyed eating the acorns deposited by those oak trees in an area that was mostly peaceful, which meant that I got very familiar with seeing squirrels as a child, even if not familiar enough to tame them, being a somewhat shy young fellow myself.

My education in squirrels took a somewhat darker turn when my frequent visits to the University of South Florida library in Tampa as a high school student led me to witness the bad side of squirrels’ increasing familiarity with people. Far from the timid and acorn-eating squirrels of my childhood, the squirrels I witnessed as a high school student doing frequent research at the library were a far more brazen bunch of buck-toothed rodents. One of my classmates got bit by a squirrel who then grabbed her lunch and left her with a bite wound and the need for a rabies shot. Another time I was accosted as a high school student one afternoon by a gang of squirrels who ominously made it known that they expected some snacks from me, and then fought each other over the candy wrapper and mostly empty chip bag that they then received. I didn’t know whether to feel alarmed that I had been threatened by the rodents or sad that they were junk food junkies from being around college students all the time.

Thoughts of the dangerous interactions between squirrels and human beings that I had witnessed as a teenager were prompted by a recent (and grimly humorous) article that discussed the problem of power outages caused all over the nation (including in both Tampa and at least four times this summer in the Portland area) by the seemingly innocent squirrel [2]. Apparently squirrels are responsible for a somewhat alarming (and largely undocumented) number of power outages that occur when a squirrel creates a short in a substation and its charred corpse fries the power grid. Though as human beings we tend to think of our own inconvenience when this occurs, it is of course a far more traumatic experience for the squirrel who ends extra crispy because of his curiosity in a place that appears to be a safe and comfortable place full of acorns and protection from predators.

As a person with an abiding interest both in protecting the well-being of mostly innocent animals (except when they have been corrupted by humans), and as a person with an interest in protecting an increasingly vulnerable infrastructure that is also increasingly important to our well-being, there has to be a way to keep squirrels from getting fried. So far efforts at scaring away squirrels have been less than successful, as even fox urine has apparently not frightened away the little animals from meeting their demise in our electric substations. What may work, even if it requires a bit of experimentation as well as effort and creativity, would be making substations less hospitable to squirrels. Given that squirrels seem to value the flat roofs of substations as a perfect place to bask and to make their running leaps into trees, perhaps it might be worthwhile to make the roofs of substations less hospitable to squirrels by making them pitched rather than flat. Likewise, making substations less hollow might make them less hospitable to squirrels looking for a safe place from predators that only turns into a lure to a far more grim fate. Perhaps it would be worthwhile, considering the fact that a single cooked squirrel can take out energy for thousands of people at a time, to help design some spaces that would serve our interests without serving as bait for squirrels. It’s worth the effort, at least.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/the-creature-of-a-squirrels-nightmares/

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/opinion/sunday/squirrel-power.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0