It was in 1990 that Gregg Bassett had his first close encounter with a squirrel, when she pressed her nose against his back porch window. “I was never the same after that,” he says. Squirrels began approaching cautiously when he and his wife, Kathy, took their evening walks. Bassett coaxed one squirrel to take a nut from his hand, and eventually a squirrel he named GG–short for “Gray Girl”–began taking peanuts from his mouth. (That was rather risky on his part, Bassett says, because wild squirrels are unpredictable and have sharp teeth and claws like needles.) “This squirrel got to where she treated me with total abandon,” he says. “I’d come out of the house, and she’d come blasting across the lawn.”
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“We’re not an animal-rights group,” Bassett says. “I won’t hunt or eat squirrel, but I also won’t stop hunters. I wouldn’t want my steaks taken from me by someone in a cow lovers’ club. But on the serious side, we will stick up for squirrel lovers and people who want to keep squirrels as pets.”
In September 1994, Bassett read a newspaper article about a woman in Garden City, Kansas, who’d adopted a baby fox squirrel. “Her cat treated it as a fifth kitten,” Bassett says. Mary Guy got in trouble with the law for her good deed, however. “The Kansas department of wildlife was saying she couldn’t keep the squirrel as a pet,” Bassett says. “But there was a loophole under Kansas law. If she bought a $13 license from the wildlife department, she could keep the squirrel until hunting season ended. That bought her some time.”
Squirrels are a cause celebre for some. The white squirrels of Olney–the result of genetic variation in eastern gray squirrels, according to Bassett–have put this downstate town on the map for squirrel lovers. The Olney Chamber of Commerce has hung white squirrel banners from light poles, and Olney police officers wear shoulder patches that feature the rodent. In 1999, Bassett contacted the publishers of Chase’s Calendar of Events and paid $50 to designate the first full week in October Squirrel Awareness Week–a period that always falls within Olney’s three-week squirrel study. The idea was to honor “one of the friendliest forms of wildlife,” Bassett says.
Sereda once accompanied Bassett to Olney, but now he mostly enjoys watching squirrels entertain his granddaughter. “There’s one who comes down around ten o’clock, 10:15,” he says. “He comes onto the windowsill and knocks on the glass to catch the baby’s attention. The baby gets a big kick out of it.”
