From: Yahoo! News
Posted: 4/29/02

Thursday April 25 09:14 PM EDT
Squirrels Invade Stanford University

By Tony Russomanno

They may look cute and furry.

"Yesterday, I was riding my bike along Escondido Road, when all of a sudden, my friend Katie screamed at me," said Vauhimi Vara. "When I turned around, it turned out I had almost biked over a dead squirrel ... It was quite traumatic."

The campus squirrels have apparently taken to bizarre suicidal death leaps into the path of oncoming student bikers.

"It's really hard to even ride your bike on campus," said Katie Founds. "They're always leaping in front of you."

Terror? You don't know the meaning of the word.

"It's pretty scary, actually," said Walter Shen. "They got these huge claws ... like Spiderman up the walls."

Squirrels are invading campus dorms.

"A squirrel just got in my room the other day," Shen said. "They just got in and ate a whole bag of my Chips Ahoy cookies."

The squirrel is wily, that much we know. But now, there's evidence they may also be hackers.

"They got into one of the residences, and they started typing on the keyboard," Shen said. "They ran over the person's laptop keyboard. They actually somehow renamed the person's hard drive."

The invasion turned one dorm into a real, live Animal House.

"Sometimes, they get in and they leave feces and urine everywhere," Shen said. "They eat up people's furniture."

The renegade rodents have their supporters. There are those who believe a school is known by the company of squirrels it keeps. Stanford rates an impressive four-plus squirrel heads on Jon's World o' Squirrels Web page.

But Cal wins with a full five heads -- perhaps because a U.C. Berkeley pest control manager actually once used CPR to revive a fallen baby squirrel.

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