A drawing of a place where I could have seen one had I understood squirrel behavior.

[Doug]

This outing hurts, because I could have possibly seen one doing would knocks, but not understanding squirrel behave, caused me to use misjudgement.

[Doug]

I will elaborate on this at a later date.

[bipedalist]

Barking squirrels have their own coconut telegraph that is for certain, sometimes it is because they do not understand what they see or encounter if it is novel to their environment, a sort of alarming surprise. 

[Doug]

This one is kinda long, so I will do it in chapters. I don't like long typing sessions.

 

Chapter one: The area and events leading up to the encounter

The events occurred near the extinct townsite of Valsetz Oregon in the east side of the Oregon Coast range 16 miles from the nearest town, which is Falls City. It was in the early 90's and I was bow hunting with several different people over a period of time. On more than one occasion, we would hear wood knocks frequently above the townsite on the south east slope of Sugarloaf mountain and near the cliffside of Rooster Rock. Wood knocks were becoming common in our hunting area. We had not heard them before that we could remember and we had no idea what was making them. The incident I will relate happened to the south east of Rooster Rock about maybe three miles away on what is known as the Valsetz Flats. There are old logging roads that had grown over and was now basically wide ways with a well worn game trail down the middle. My brother and I were bowhunting and decided to walk up a gated logging road that would take us from the Flats to Fanno Ridge. We hadn't been on this road in many years, so we wanted to hunt up it and it's side roads more for nostalgic reasons than anything, though, at that time, elk were abundant in the area.