He’s Growing!

He’s nearly doubled his weight and is filling up both my hands.

Starting to sit up, and his tail is starting to curl over his back.

He still spends the majority of his time sleeping, but he does a bit of exploring too.

Squirrels are extremely sensitive to smell and do not like perfumes & such. I read that last week, and today I saw firsthand how true that is. Last night I changed my fingernail polish. Removed the old and applied 3 coats of new. When I fed Kevin this morning, he shied away from my hand three times, and he didn’t want to curl up in my hand to sleep. I didn’t think anything of it. Between that feeding and the next, I applied one more coat of polish. Two hours later, I opened his little “nest” to get him out to feed him. When my hand got close, he jumped at it as though to attack it. (No upper teeth yet, so it just gave me a good fright.). Once again, he didn’t want to curl up in my hand to sleep, and he was quite agitated.

It occurred to me that it might be the smell of the polish. I watched the videos of me opening the bin—I always film it—and it was plain as day that as soon as he got close to my fingers, he shook his head and turned away from me.

I removed the polish and scrubbed my hands to get rid of any lingering scent. This evening when I opened the bin, he reached out to smell my hand and climbed right in. He was calm and also snugged in my hand to sleep.

So…no more polish for me til after his release.