A Blizzard Of Squirrel News

You know its slow when the mainstream media start making a big deal about shark attacks. It must be really slow when squirrels are headline news.

Squirrels Cut Power in Two Midwestern Cities.

Brian Elwood, a spokesman for Xcel Energy, said a squirrel came in contact with an overhead transformer and knocked out service to 177 customers Monday. Power was fully restored in just under an hour, and repair crews found the remains of the "unfortunate squirrel," he said.

By coincidence, another squirrel got into a substation 40 miles away in Ironwood, Mich., Monday morning and caused a temporary outage that affected about 1,400 customers in Ironwood and two nearby communities, Elwood said.

Mystery Animal Squirrel, Not Orangutan

An animal sneaking around Baker County is not an orangutan as originally thought but likely a fox squirrel, state wildlife officials said Friday. Officers with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission laid doughnuts at a base of a tree after residents reported seeing a "big orange ball of fur."

The animal was probably an orange phase fox squirrel, Fish and Wildlife investigator Ken Holmes told The Florida Times-Union. The red-orange animals can grow to be about 2 feet tall and can climb in trees.

"I'll be astonished if it's an orangutan," Holmes said. "I can quite confidently say it's probably not an orangutan."

He said the animal's eating habits did not match with the patterns of a primate.

New Jersey Squirrels OK To Eat

Squirrel eaters in the US state of New Jersey have been told that the bushy-tailed rodents are likely safe to eat, after earlier being advised the unlikely delicacies could contain toxic metals.

Another explanation for the flurry of squirrel news is that the traditional Thanksgiving homeless stories are turning off news consumers.