The Maine Woods at Night

I wrote this for a travel writing competition in BBC Wildlife Magazine. It didn't win but I like it anyway!

The Maine coast is a glacier-scrubbed jigsaw of drowned coves between long, low, granite “necks” that are clothed in a blanket of mossy forest. A walk in the endless Maine woods can be an eerie experience, especially at night. You may come across sections of old dry-stone wall or a chimney breast with trees growing out of it. Long-lost family graveyards appear almost anywhere that there is a pocket of precious soil. It’s literally a hard place to bury your dead. And it’s almost silent.

Our ramshackle summer home was in those woods and it was made of wood. Like the surrounding, dripping forest, it just sat on the granite with no foundations and slowly rotted away around us.

We put up bird-feeders, not expecting much to come beneath the misty-grey shade of the pines, but within minutes we had attracted a hummingbird and a sparrow. However it wasn’t long before the vandals arrived in the form of chipmunks and grey squirrels, making it impossible to maintain the feeders in the day time, so we filled them up at dusk. All the same, they were empty by morning.

Something was emptying our feeders at night.

We drove around after sunset, weaving about so that our headlights searched the woods for glowing eyes. White-tailed deer, foxes, raccoons and skunks became regulars. We screeched to a halt to watch a bear in a roadside pine, but he turned out to be a satellite-dish that served another cabin that was lost in the woods. Finally we saw a porcupine climbing a tree, but he seemed too ungainly to be our seed-stealer.

At the local gun store, I bought a bright, red and white LED head-torch, designed for tracking blood-stains. The idea behind this is that, if you shoot an intruder with a crossbow or a hand gun, you can track him down as he limps off into the blackness. Dialling 911 isn’t the way they do things in this part of Maine!

I took my coffee and camera out to the deck and sat near the feeders, using my white light to scan the tall trees until I saw something up there, but what? The head-light wasn’t helping so I turned it off, along with all the lights in the house.

As I waited for my night-vision to improve, I became aware of feverish gremlin-like activity very close-by. It sounded like about a hundred cartoon chipmunks running round a tree and having a party. If this was Africa, I’d have said we had bush-babies in the yard but I saw some white arrow-shapes flash horizontally by. Were they birds then?

I waited until I was sure that these critters were on the feeders before turning on my red light. Everything stopped, and the thieves knew they were nabbed, red-handed. They froze as if to say “Uh-oh”, and their guilty, beady, black-button eyes almost popped out of their cute little heads.

Imagine six hyperactive creatures the size of chipmunks but with tails like squirrels and the face, fur and colour of edible dormice; soft chinchilla-grey on top and spotless white underneath. These incredibly clean, lean, fluffy rodents were stealing several pounds of bird-food a night. It seemed impossible. But what were they?

I looked through the Peterson field guide and decided on Northern flying squirrels, and so these enigmatic, nocturnal creatures became my obsession for the next week. They turned out to be not at all shy; they just totally shunned the light. A person without a light could stand inches away from them and they would continue to steal food all the time, but surely they couldn’t eat all that seed in one night?

Actually they hide it for later, just like chipmunks or hamsters they fill their pouches with food to carry it off and hide it for use in the long New England winter. I could see them doing it.

Can flying squirrels really fly? They don’t have wings, just a hankie shaped flap between their legs on each side, but perhaps they waggle their tails to add impetus? What I saw mostly was a J shaped trajectory where they accelerated downwards, flattened out and then flew to a lower point on an adjacent tree; always head-up. Nine times out of ten I only caught the latter part of their flight so I saw them ‘flying’ horizontally then upwards, giving the impression of true flight.

You can find flying squirrels in forests all over New England, despite the locals telling you they aren’t there.