Thursday, August 6, 2009

Sugar Gliders & Flying Squirrels. Childhood Pets

As adventurous kids we were always dragging home garter snakes, box turtles, lightning bugs and leopard frogs to mom's despair. Springtime was when we found many pets as the little ones tumbled out of their nests and got lost. One of the best finds in the woods behind our house was a flying squirrel. There's something magical about animals that soar and these little guys are fearless. They can sail like Superman from tall oak tree to maple tree.

I first saw a flying squirrel along Coldwater Creek behind our home in MO. At first glance it looked like many of the tree squirrels that sailed limb to limb along the lush park that bounded the creek. Something was different about this little guy though so I moved closer to watch it fly. My friend Randy later caught a baby flying squirrel and we made it our pet.

The first thing we noticed was they should come with a butt plug because they pooped everywhere. Even when you made sure it had taken care of business before you took it out of it's cage it would proceed to crap all over mom's new couch. We took the squirrel to school for show and tell and he was the hit of the day.

The longest I can remember one sailing was about 70 feet in a tree to tree jump. I thought he was going to break his little neck in the descent and hard landing.

Nope.

He got up, dusted himself off and started scoping out his next DZ.

Nowadays I see sugar gliders from Austrailia as pets in MO, they're illegal to own here in CA and a couple other states. A bit cuter than the flying squirrels we knew but the same poop warning applies.

A video of some of the fun you can have with the high wire acrobats of the forest.

2 comments:

Holly Heyser said...

I. Want. One.

Sooooo cute!

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