The Clucking Squirrel Story.

I was standing by the gate to the Harry Potter wood this morning when I heard what sounded like a chicken clucking. I happen to know the woman who lives over the back of that wood and I know she has chickens, so I thought it unremarkable that one them might have gone walkabout. Until, that is, I realised that the sound was coming from up in the trees, and I don’t think there’s a chicken alive which would be capable of flying into a tree.

And so I searched for the source of the mystery and discovered that it was a grey squirrel, watching me intently and apparently speaking to me in the language of chickens. OK, now I’m being a little fanciful, but the fact of the matter is this:

I’ve lived much of my life in the countryside and have encountered very many grey squirrels, but I’ve never heard one vocalising before. I didn’t think they could. I lived for a short time near a beech wood in Northumberland which contained a rare colony of native red squirrels, and they often used to chatter when I walked through it. But it was a sharper sound – more of a clicking than a clucking. And now I know I’ve been wrong all these years.

I told Mel the story and she was disappointed. She said it would have been far more interesting if the source of the sound really had been a chicken because then it would have indicated that I’d crossed into a parallel dimension, one in which chickens are much better flyers. And I suppose she has a point.

Since then, however, I’ve thought of another explanation. Let's suppose that chickens have been fooling us all along and they really can fly up into trees. And suppose they’re good friends with the grey squirrels and together conspired to play a trick on this dumb human who’s completely useless when it comes to climbing or flying into trees.

‘I’ll hide so he can’t see me, and then I’ll start to cluck,’ says the chicken. ‘You stand on a branch where he can’t fail to see you and open and close your mouth.’

‘Good idea,’ says the squirrel. ‘These humans think they’re God’s gift to planet earth and we don’t matter. That should set ‘em thinking.’

But probably not.