My 11-month-old was actively attempting to ingest a handful of premium Portland moss when my phone vibrated in my pocket. We were doing our mandatory morning yard time, which mostly consists of me following him around like a poorly programmed Roomba while he tries to put environmental hazards into his mouth.
The text was from my 15-year-old niece. It just said: Have you read the talented baby squirrel yet? It's intense.
I wiped a clump of wet dirt from my son's chin and stared at the screen. My initial processing unit assumed this was a new viral TikTok video. Or maybe a highly recommended interactive board book about woodland creatures learning to play the xylophone. I've an 11-month-old, so my entire media consumption currently revolves around animated animals learning basic emotional regulation.
So, while my son temporarily distracted himself by slapping the trunk of our massive backyard oak tree, I opened a browser tab and searched for it.
The dark reality of naming conventions
I need to talk about internet metadata for a second because I'm genuinely bewildered by how media is categorized these days. If you type this phrase into a search engine expecting a cute story about a fuzzy rodent with a knack for jazz piano, you're going to experience a severe system crash.
It turns out that it's the title of a wildly popular Korean manhwa—a webcomic. But it's not for children. It's not even adjacent to children. From what I could parse together in three minutes of frantic reading while my son gnawed on a twig, it's a dark fantasy saga involving domestic abuse, complex assassination plots, betrayals, and bloody revenge.
Who names a story about assassins like it's a bedtime book you'd buy at a scholastic book fair? The naming syntax makes zero sense. I spent a solid ten minutes spiraling about the SEO implications of this. Imagine the sheer volume of sleep-deprived millennials like me, desperately searching for a nice animal story to read to their toddler, only to click a link and find a beautifully illustrated frame of a fantasy character plotting to murder their political rivals. It's a UX nightmare. If I ever write a brutal sci-fi thriller about the collapse of modern society, I guess I'll title it The Sleepy Little Bunny Who Learned to Share.
I was in the middle of drafting a highly sarcastic text back to my niece about age-appropriate content algorithms when my son made his alert noise. It's this specific, high-pitched grunt he uses when he encounters a physical object that defies his understanding of physics.
I looked down.
An actual biological anomaly in the grass
Sitting about three feet from my kid's knees was a pink, nearly hairless node of biological material. It looked like a bruised thumb that had sprouted tiny, frantic claws. It was twitching.
My brain, still buffering from the assassin webcomic, took a full four seconds to categorize the object. It was, in fact, a deeply untalented, entirely real baby squirrel that had somehow fallen out of the oak tree above us.
According to the frantic Googling I did three minutes later, squirrels have two breeding seasons, one of which perfectly overlaps with peak summer yard-play weather. If the animal's eyes are closed and it's under six inches long without a fluffy tail, it's basically an infant. This thing was maybe four inches long and looked like an alien firmware prototype.
Dr. Google and the rabies panic
My first reaction as a first-time dad is always to assume maximum catastrophic failure. My kid was pointing at the hairless alien, slowly leaning forward with his mouth open, clearly wondering if it tasted like the moss.
I scooped him up like a football, backed away to a safe distance of fifteen feet, and immediately assumed we were dealing with a rabies vector. I texted my wife, who was in a marketing meeting downtown, a blurry photo of the grass with the caption: Fallen squirrel. Rabies? Do we burn the yard?
She didn't text back, probably because she knows I do this.
I tried to remember what our pediatrician, Dr. Aris, had vaguely implied during our 9-month checkup when I asked him about the safety of local parks. He mentioned something about small rodents basically never carrying the virus because they physically don't survive the encounters that would infect them in the first place, or maybe their core body temperature is wrong for it. I don't remember the exact science, but apparently, the CDC confirms it's essentially a non-issue.
So rabies was off the table. But ticks, fleas, and a robust array of weird bacterial infections were definitely still on it, which was enough for me to keep my squirming son firmly clamped under my arm.
Recompiling the nest
The internet is full of terrible advice about wildlife, mostly involving eyedroppers of cow's milk and shoeboxes in living rooms. I skipped the forums and went straight to the wildlife rescue pages.
The protocol for a fallen baby squirrel is surprisingly simple and requires minimal human intervention, which is exactly my preferred style of parenting. You aren't supposed to touch them with bare hands. You definitely aren't supposed to feed them because their digestive systems will basically crash and reboot irreparably if you give them the wrong fluids.
You just have to put them back in the tree and let the mother's retrieval algorithm do the work.
I strapped my highly offended 11-month-old into his stroller so he couldn't interfere. I found my heavy leather gardening gloves, grabbed a small cardboard delivery box from the recycling bin, and threw some dry oak leaves inside. I gently scooped up the tiny, blind creature—which weighed about as much as a USB mouse—and placed it in the box. Then I wedge the box securely into a low fork of the oak tree.
Then, we retreated to the patio to monitor the logs.
Silicone replacements and surviving the afternoon
We sat on the patio for forty-five minutes. My son was furious. He wanted to be back in the dirt. He was wearing his Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit, which is basically our default uniform because it breathes well in the humid Portland summer and somehow stretches enough to accommodate his constant flailing. Plus, it lacks all those synthetic materials that give him weird red patches on his neck. I was highly aware that I was going to have to throw it straight into the washing machine on the highest heat setting anyway, just because he had been adjacent to wild rodent territory.
To stop him from screaming about his lost moss-eating privileges, I had to deploy countermeasures.
I went inside and grabbed his Squirrel Teether Silicone Baby Gum Soother. Yes, the irony was thick, but parenting is mostly about leaning into the absurd.
I'll be honest, this teether is one of the few pieces of baby hardware we own that actually functions exactly as advertised. His top teeth have been trying to compile for three weeks, and our nights have been an endless loop of crying. This little green silicone squirrel has been our only saving grace. It has this ring shape that his clumsy hands can actually grip without dropping it every four seconds, and a textured acorn detail that he furiously gnaws on.
I handed it to him. He immediately jammed the silicone squirrel's tail into his mouth and stared angrily at the oak tree. The distraction worked.
The hardware we actually use
While we waited for the mother squirrel to spawn, I also tried to interest him in his Gentle Baby Building Block Set. We brought them out to the patio. Look, they're perfectly fine blocks. They're made of soft rubber, they don't have BPA or formaldehyde, and they've little numbers and fruit shapes on them. But if I'm being completely objective, my son mostly just likes to throw them at our sliding glass door to hear the dull thud.
He pushed the blocks off the stroller tray. He only wanted the silicone squirrel teether. Fine. You optimize for what works.
At precisely 14:42, the mother squirrel finally descended from the upper canopy. She did a frantic, twitchy inspection of the cardboard box, grabbed the bald little alien by the scruff of its neck, and hauled it straight up the trunk into the leaves.
Bug resolved. Ticket closed.
I texted my niece back: The comic looks terrifying. I just put a real baby squirrel in a box. Please don't tell your mother.
If your kid is currently trying to eat wildlife, or if their teeth are just making them miserable, check out the teething survival gear before they find something worse to chew on in the yard.
Unprofessional answers to your specific questions
Is that squirrel webcomic genuinely okay for young kids?
Absolutely not. It sounds like a Pixar movie, but it's a violent, complex revenge drama meant for teenagers and adults. If your seven-year-old is asking about it, they're talking about assassins, not acorns. I highly suggest genuinely checking the tags on these manhwas before you hand over the iPad.
Do small backyard rodents carry rabies?
My pediatrician effectively laughed at me for this one. Apparently, the CDC tracks this stuff, and small rodents like squirrels, hamsters, and chipmunks are almost never found to be infected with rabies. They aren't known to transmit it to humans. I still wouldn't let my kid lick one, though.
What exactly should I do if my kid finds a fallen animal?
Don't touch it with your bare hands, keep your pets away, and don't try to feed it cow's milk from your fridge. Just put it in a shallow, breathable container near where you found it, ideally off the ground if you can safely wedge it in a tree, and wait for the mother. They almost always come back unless they're dead.
How do I know if my baby's teether is safe after dropping it in the yard?
Which is why we only buy food-grade silicone stuff now. If he drops the Kianao teether in the moss, I just take it inside, run it under aggressively hot water with dish soap, or throw it in the dishwasher. You can't do that with the weird wooden ones without them splintering or getting waterlogged.
Will the mother squirrel reject her baby if she smells a human on it?
This is a massive myth. Birds and squirrels don't care if you touched their baby with your gardening gloves. Their instinct to retrieve their biological hard drive is way stronger than their aversion to your scent. Just give them space to do it.
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