When Tahanto Trail resident Dave Woodsum heard that vandals were suspected of cutting the lights on the tree on the Common, he had his doubts. Woodsum, an electrician who helped take care of the lights for many years before retiring from the fire department, remembered that rodents had damaged the wires on that tree from time to time. So when he inspected the tree, he told the Press, he was not surprised to discover that the lighting wires had indeed been chewed, not cut with a sharp-edged tool by a human miscreant as previously reported.
What appear to be teeth marks are visible on a bulb found among the leaves under the town tree. (Photo by Lisa Aicukewicz)
After listening to Woodsum’s diagnosis, this reporter returned to the scene and found locations where the wires had been cut. Every cut had been made at a spot where a bulb should have been, and 18 bulbs were strewn in the leaves under the tree, each with chew marks on the ends. And an online search led to dozens of stories of squirrels chewing light bulbs off strands of holiday lights, perhaps mistaking the bulbs for nuts or pine cones. Case closed, it would seem.
Many of those articles suggested that squirrels do more damage to LED (light emitting diode) lights than to incandescent lights. A television station in Milwaukee reported in 2007 that when the city switched to energy-efficient LEDs to light its Red Arrow Park, squirrels began chewing the wires. Employees at the city’s Department of Public Works speculated that the incandescent lights carried a larger electrical current, which would have given the squirrels a shock.
A similar story was reported a few years ago in the Kingston Whig-Standard of Kingston, Ontario. Ever since the incandescent lights in a city park were replaced by LEDs, squirrels have been doing so much damage that the group responsible for decorating the park has been forced to reduce the number of trees it lights. The group speculated that the coating on the old-style lights was thicker, so the squirrels couldn’t break through it.
But according to Cincinnati.com, squirrels at the Cincinnati Zoo found a way around that obstacle, too. Before the zoo switched to LEDs, the squirrels simply unscrewed the incandescent bulbs then in use and carried them off.
Red bulbs not as tasty?
In Fredericton, New Brunswick, CBC News reported in a 2009 story that gray squirrels began chewing the lights used to decorate downtown trees when the city switched to LEDs, but they didn’t chew the red ones. One resident agreed, saying that on the north side of Fredericton, the squirrels liked every color except red. But a YouTube video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN6S3ar2eNE) shows a gray squirrel stealing a red bulb. According to the book “Squirrels: The Animal Answer Guide,” gray squirrels do see color, but they are red-green colorblind, suggesting that if they didn’t like red bulbs, they wouldn’t like green ones, either.
Last year’s deep snows made the lower branches of the Harvard tree accessible to any hungry animal. In addition, the bulbs had a textured pattern similar to that of a pine cone. But Woodsum said that over the years that he took care of the lights, the wires had cuts all the way up to the top of the tree and that those lights were red, white, and green incandescent lights. Woodsum told the Press that he had no idea how to keep animals from chewing the wires.
