Back in New Hampshire, I was often engaged in a losing battle with squirrels. We had them for a while in the wall of the house and in the bay window, found they’d chewed into the attic through the flashing around the chimney, and were never able to eradicate them from the Red Barn, where they pretty much devoured a 20-foot strip of crown molding. They were always digging up bulbs or taking chunks out fruits and vegetables in our gardens.

At least we eventually got a birdfeeder that would send them falling off, an advance that left us endlessly amused, especially when we noticed the obsessed critter as a new kid on the block.

One good friend, an avid gardener, aptly dubbed them tree-climbing rats with big tails.

Here are a few related facts.

1. They eat their own body weight every week, typically 1½ pounds.
2. They can find food buried under a foot of snow or, for males, smell a female in heat a mile away.
3. Their front teeth never stop growing, even when they eat right through wood.
4. They can climb about anything. Yes, metal poles are no problem. Plus they can rotate their front feet 180 degrees.
5. To elude predators, they run in sharp zigzags. They also have a way of moving to the side of a tree trunk opposite the side of a human, keeping themselves out of sight.
6. They can leap ten times their body length. But not quite that much straight up, which I think is only five lengths.
7. They can fall 30 meters without injury and run sprints at 20 miles an hour.
8. They can travel as much as 100 miles in a day. So much for all those Havahart trap runs I took across the state line, just to add a river between us and the liberated rodent.
9. By chewing electrical wiring in the walls and attic, they’re a major cause of house fires, perhaps 30,000 a year globally. They’re also responsible for an estimated 20 percent of electrical power outages, including knocking out entire transformers and leaving towns in the dark.
10. Chipmunks are a kind of small squirrel with a prominent stripe rather than a big fluffy tail. They may be cute, but they may be the most destructive of all of their kin.

At least we don’t notice them around our current home on an island in Maine. Instead, we have deer.