Living alongside wildlife is wonderful. It is calming, restorative and endlessly fascinating. It brings foxes into the garden on summer mornings, sparrowhawks flashing past the kitchen window and tawny owls calling from the woods after dark. It reminds you, almost every day, that we are still surrounded by wild lives, quietly going about their own business. What people don’t often mention is that those same wild lives occasionally decide to get on with their business at your expense.
In our case, that business involved eating the bloody roof.
Not the moss growing on it. Not something edible they had carried up there and temporarily misplaced. The roof itself. More specifically, the lead flashing around the edge of the flat roof, which members of Squirrel Nation had apparently decided was some sort of premium metallic dental chew.
When Squirrels Eat the Bloody Roof
We spotted the damage ourselves and asked a roofer to come and take a look. He climbed onto the flat roof, wandered around for a few minutes, and soon found the evidence. Tiny claw marks where little squirrel hands had gripped the flashing, accompanied by neat rows of tooth marks along the lead. He climbed back down, looked at us, and said, “In forty years of roofing, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
That sounded about right.
Our garden has developed an uncanny habit of producing wildlife incidents that experienced professionals somehow manage to avoid throughout their otherwise lengthy careers.
A bit of reading later confirmed that our squirrels weren’t uniquely eccentric. Apparently, squirrels really do chew lead flashing. Their front teeth grow continuously, so they need to gnaw to keep them worn down. For reasons best known to squirrels and evolution, lead seems to appeal to them.
Somewhere, I imagine another bewildered homeowner has stood beneath a steadily expanding damp patch while a squirrel sat on the chimney, looking unusually pleased with itself.
The particularly irritating part is that they cannot claim to be hungry. Squirrel Nation has its own hoppers. They raid the bird feeders with military precision. They excavate anything recently planted, steal from one another with alarming efficiency, and bury food in places they immediately forget. At no point have they lacked access to nuts, seeds, or the countless other things a squirrel might reasonably be expected to eat.
And yet somebody looked at the roof and thought, I’ll have a bit of that.
We’re now looking at humane deterrents before the flat roof becomes less of a roof and more of a decorative suggestion. I love the little buggers, but there are limits. Developing a taste for heavy metals is comfortably beyond them.
The whole episode did make me realise something, though. People romanticise living close to nature. They picture birdsong drifting through an open window, butterflies flitting over the flowers and perhaps a fox appearing in the soft evening light. They don’t picture themselves standing in their pants at two o’clock in the morning, armed with a tea towel and trying to persuade a bat that the bedroom isn’t actually where it lives.
Sir David rarely mentions that part.
Living alongside wildlife means accepting that the boundary between your home and theirs becomes surprisingly blurred. Visitors arrive unannounced, usually without knocking, and almost never with any intention of leaving the way they came in.
To date, we’ve removed eighteen bats from the house. Then there are the countless Freds (our collective noun for mice, voles and shrews), along with bees, wasps, beetles, butterflies and moths. Everything is carefully caught where necessary and released outside, usually with considerably more patience than it showed when inviting itself in.
Alf has wandered through the open back door and into the kitchen on more than one occasion. He always enters with the quiet confidence of a wood pigeon who believes he has finally been invited in. Then somebody notices him. Alf realises his administrative error, and the entire situation rapidly descends into chaos.
He careers around the kitchen, bumping into furniture and shitting on the floor while we try to guide him back towards the enormous open doorway through which he arrived perfectly happily a few moments earlier. His ability to locate an entrance is considerably better than his ability to recognise it from the other side.
We’ve found a robin perched on the upstairs shower head. There has been a greenfinch in the garage. Moths appear in almost every room, where they immediately abandon millions of years of evolutionary wisdom and attempt to achieve low Earth orbit around the nearest light bulb.
The open back door also seems to serve as an emergency wildlife refuge whenever Her Majesty or Barry is hunting in the garden. Starlings are the usual offenders. They come barrelling through the doorway at full speed, immediately realise there is glass, and thud into the nearest closed window.
What follows is always the same carefully choreographed rescue operation involving curtains, open windows, and two increasingly stressed humans trying to convince a terrified bird that we are, despite appearances, entirely on its side. Eventually, it finds its way out again, leaving behind a few feathers, a small amount of panic-induced shit, and two people whose heart rates suggest they’ve just run a 10K.
Jarvis occasionally brings his own guests. One evening, he proudly brought home a juvenile rat, which promptly escaped and tried to leave through the cat flap. It had correctly identified the only dedicated small-animal exit in the house and was earnestly trying to operate it without having first been issued the necessary microchip. That was impressive. Unwelcome, but impressive.
What Coexistence Actually Looks Like
This, it turns out, is what coexistence actually looks like.
It isn’t just the moments people photograph: the fox in golden evening light, the owl calling from the woods, or the sparrowhawk perched in perfect profile. It’s the rest of it, too. It’s flowerpots being excavated, bird food disappearing at alarming speed, wildlife finding inventive ways into the house, and, every now and again, discovering that part of your home has become somebody else’s chew toy.
None of it diminishes the joy of living alongside nature. If anything, it reminds me that these animals aren’t decorations in a landscape for our benefit. They are simply getting on with their own lives, blissfully unconcerned with our roofs, carpets or repair bills.
Most days, I wouldn’t swap any of it. The foxes, the owls, the bats, the accidental house guests, even Squirrel Nation. Living alongside wildlife was never going to be tidy. It was only ever going to be real.