Maine Roads May Look More Like a Graveyard for Squirrels this Year

A few summers ago, the squirrel roadkill situation was out of control.

Remember a couple years ago, it seemed everywhere you went, you just saw dead squirrels littering the roadsides. Half the time, I didn't know whether to have a bit of a laugh about it, or whether I should cry deep tears of mourning, for what felt like an absolute squirrel-pocalypse.

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Not to mention, I think I personally hit three squirrels that year. Now, I'm an animal lover. Generally speaking, I'd rather roll my car over, than inconvenience an animal. So to hit one, it really bothered me. I get it, it's the nature of the world. But then I read online that it wasn't my imagination. There was a reason there were squirrels everywhere.

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Squirrel baby-booms are caused by acorn "baby booms".

So occasionally, an occurrence happens with certain types of trees, called a mast year. When this happens, circumstances present themselves that cause these trees to produce huge amounts of fruit or nuts. And it's basically a trickle-down affect from there. There's an abundance of food, and that turns into a lot of baby animals.

When there's less food, there's less babies. We're boiling this down quite a bit here, but it's the basic explanation. If you make animals fat, dumb, and happy... They're going to make lots of little baby animals. When mast years happen, this is what turns into squirrel carnage the following summer.

How long does the boom last?

Well, it seems to balance itself out from year to year. Next year, the trees could under-produce significantly, and that will cause the population of squirrels, etc. to wane and steady itself. These mast years happen every 2-5 years in Maine, so from time to time we'll definitely experience these periods of intense squirrel mortality.

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But rest assured, if there's any slightly morbid silver lining to this, it's that if there's a lot of squirrels being hit by cars following a mast year, there are still lots of squirrels that aren't being hit by cars. We're never in any danger of squirrels becoming endangered in Maine. The acorns will probably disappear before the squirrels, hahaha.

Here's your odd animal question for the day, answered...