Driving in Ancon, a largely wooded neighborhood in Panama City, one of my first weeks in Panama, I nearly swerved off the road when a large rodent, the size and shape of a mutant hamster, scurried out from the brush and into the center of the street, standing on its hind legs to stare me down then scampering back into the shrubs. “What the fuck was that?” I shouted, and without even looking up from her magazine, my friend Marta said it was a capybara.

How anyone could be so nonchalant about an animal the size, shape, and exoticness of the capybara was beyond me, with Marta going on to tell me she and her friends used to catch them as children and release them in the ocean. I felt bad for the capybaras they released into the ocean as it was a cruel thing to do to such a fascinating and unusual creature. Granted, he had almost caused me a wreck, but that was besides the point.

I grew up in the town of Princeton, New Jersey, home to the famous Princeton University whose existence is in integral component of downtown society. What many people don’t know is that, besides a wealth of smart students, Princeton University’s campus is home to a large following of squirrels, among them a rare contingent of black squirrels that are native to the Northeast. Although these squirrels reside in perhaps the most appropriate town to be studied, no one really knows why the blacks keep to the Princeton area.

I used to ride my bike to school and the quickest route took me through the campus of Princeton, beneath the ivied archways and past the old stone cathedrals. Back then I knew Princeton’s campus not for it’s groundbreaking work in molecular science but for its bike jumps and more specifically, its squirrel population: I would have been unlucky on any given day if I didn’t see one hundred to twenty thousand squirrels. The way I can best describe it was like a toned-down version of the annual red crab migration on Christmas Island where, if you’re not looking, you may crush a few when you jump.

The kingdom of squirrels at Princeton ranged from normal grey squirrels, to black squirrels, to few albino squirrels that looked scarily like baby demon wolves. Being exposed to such a variety had a way of desensitizing you as in, “Oh, that group of squirrels attacking the old woman? They do that all the time.”

Fittingly, squirrels on Princeton’s campus were not just any squirrels, they were really smart and evolved ones: crafty in their search for food and friendly enough to scare visitors but not so friendly that someone might squirrel-nap them into a bag. And like any overwhelming facet of life, you grew to live with the squirrels in Princeton like you did the mad scientists: the ones stealing food, the ones clawing each other, the ones dead in the road hit by passing cars. After a while they just sunk into part of the landscape and you’d liken onlooking visitors to novice fisherman anxiously trying to unhook an active bass.

It struck me in the way that obvious things you’ve overlooked in the midst of exhilaration often do. Marta knew capybaras like I knew squirrels. Granted, I never captured then released any squirrels out to sea, but the analogy is still there: a number of fascinating creatures in Panama totally routine to the local, yet almost as alien to the foreigner as a small black squirrel.

This post's rating:

Related Stories

Filed under: Country Guide on March 26th, 2009