February 01, 2024 | NEWS | By Anya Potsiadlo and Emma Serralles
On Dec. 8, 2023, Veronica Bianco ‘27 walked into her first floor Loomis room to find a chewed through protein shake on her desk.
“My first thought was that it was Nolan Diffley ‘27,” Bianco said. “I thought somebody was in my room and did something weird. [Based] on past historic events, [it] was my assumption that it was him.” Unfortunately, Diffley was unavailable for comment.
Much to her dismay, after consulting her friends and her RA, she realized it had been a squirrel.
The squirrel problem is hardly unique to this year. Former The Catalyst writers have covered the topic before — namely in the fall semester of 2021, when Kristen Richardson ‘23 and Tom Byron ‘23 wrote about experiences with squirrels on campus. Richardson wrote a creative narrative story told from the perspective of the rodents themselves, while Byron provided real-life stories of recent squirrel invasions: hours-long chases, stolen Oreo sleeves and a week-long “squirrel frat party” that resulted in one student needing his room to be fumigated.
The heart of this phenomenon lies in the nature of the squirrels themselves.
Most of the squirrels that can be seen around campus are a species known as fox squirrels.
According to Alpine Wildlife Control (AWC), the fox squirrel is not native to Colorado and was instead introduced to the Denver-Colorado Springs Area to mirror the species’ presence in parks on the east coast. The AWC provides some context for the situation we are facing on campus: “The primary reason fox squirrels are such a nuisance is that our long, cold winters, coupled with relatively few hollow hardwood trees, literally force them to seek shelter indoors, i.e., inside human structures.”
Gil Vaught, the Residential Life Coordinator of Loomis, has been familiar with this issue for a long time and is unsurprised that the spontaneous visits from these little creatures are ramping back up now that it has started to get cold.
He noted that the Loomis maintenance staff have already started adjusting the placement of garbage cans and closing windows to accommodate the issue. Vaught suggested that students, too, can help avoid a squirrel break in by opting for closed food containers that are out of sight from the windows, adding that “it’s kind of hard because squirrels are just ravenous when it comes to food. Once they know that food is somewhere, they’ll continue to go to it.”
After recovering from the shock of her dorm’s squirrel break-in, Bianco is one such student taking these extra precautions, but has also come to terms with her relationship to the squirrels.
“If anything, it’s just made me less scared of them. Because even though it did happen, I came out of it unscathed physically, but of course, emotionally damaged forever.”