If the squirrels in your yard seem extra chipper on Saturday, it’s probably because that’s their day to shine.
Jan. 21 is Squirrel Appreciation Day in North America. Christy Hargrove of North Carolina invented the obscure holiday in 2001.
Squirrels are one of the most popular members of our local wildlife, says Jim Butler, a retired professor of conservation biology at the University of Alberta.
“They’re harmless, cute, beautiful and very active animals,” he says, although they can also be a pain when they chew up your attic. “I think it’s nice they’re celebrated as a group.”
Peter Murphy, a retired forestry professor in St. Albert, says he typically gets about five red squirrels in his tree-filled backyard each spring.
“They’re annoying in the sense that they fill up my storage shed with cones every year,” he says, but he’s learned to live with them.
“They’re a neat harbinger of spring.”
There are about six species of squirrel in the Edmonton region, Butler says, including Richardson’s ground squirrels (gophers), 13-lined ground squirrels, and woodchucks. Just two of these species are active at this time of year.
One is the red squirrel, which is instantly recognizable for its reddish-brown coat, twitching tail and hyperactive nature. This is their mating season, Butler says, so most are extremely active.
Red squirrels are known for eating pine cones, Murphy says, and often send them cascading down trees onto your deck.
“You know they’re out when you stand by a tree and you get a little shower of spruce cone scales [falling] down,” he says.
They also store cones in massive piles called middens, which both distributes a tree’s seed and makes a seed collector’s job simple — you just scoop up the pile.
The other active species is the northern flying squirrel.
“It’s the squirrel most Edmontonians probably never think of or even know exists,” Butler says, as it’s nocturnal.
Known for its huge eyes and grey-white fur, these squirrels use their flat tails and skin flaps between their legs to soar long distances.
Hargrove suggests celebrating this day by putting out food such as unsalted nuts.
Net-zero homes are catching on in the Edmonton region, says a panel of builders, but they haven’t quite lived up to their no-carbon promise as of yet.
Builders and renewable power fans will want to come to next week’s panel discussion of net-zero homes at Grant MacEwan University. Organized by the Solar Energy Society of Alberta, the talk will look at how the region’s net-zero homes have done over the past few years.
Edmonton now has about eight homes that are designed to be net-zero, says Rob Harlan, executive director of the Solar Energy Society of Alberta, in that they should produce as much energy as they consume.
Initial results suggest that none of them have met that energy goal, says Peter Amerongen, panellist and designer of several of those homes.
“We’ve got a little further to go,” he says.
But most are extremely close. The Mill Creek home, for example, used a net 1,600 kilowatt-hours of power in its first year of operation — about four per cent of what a regular home would have used. Designers aren’t sure what’s causing the shortfall, Amerongen says, but know that they lost about 1,000 kilowatt-hours of solar electricity due to a cloudy spring. Initial results suggest that the Belgravia home, now in its first winter, will make net-zero, he adds.
Any reduction in energy use (and, by association, greenhouse gas emissions) is a step in the right direction, Harlan notes.
“If you reach 80 per cent or 90 per cent [reduction], you’re making wonderful progress,” he says.
Net-zero proponents have also learned a lot about what does and doesn’t work from these early homes, Amerongen says. Super-insulated double wall systems work very well, and can now be found in about 50 Edmonton homes. They’ve also found that passive solar heating (windows) is more cost-effective than active heating (solar panels) when it comes to heating homes.
The talk starts at 7 p.m. at the CN Theatre this Jan. 25. Call Harlan at 780-378-6178 for details.
