Something strange began to happen when my older friends went off to college in 2020 and left me to finish out a final year of high school alone: we began to talk about squirrels.
College campus squirrels, my friends explained, bore no resemblance to their cousins in our hometown backyards. They were bigger. Fatter. Faster. They devoured chicken wings and followed people home and could be trained to perform tricks. Individual squirrels were even identifiable by distinctive personality traits or habitual quirks, such as living inside the walls as loudly as possible.
What I didn’t understand when my friends brought home stories of super-strength squirrels was that they were participating in a long, vibrant and under-appreciated tradition of mythologizing campus squirrel populations, which has been passed down for generations through student-led newspapers. It sounds like I’m joking, but I’m not.
Popular accounts of student-squirrel relations trace the craze back to at least 1938, when The Harvard Crimson covered an incident in which a squirrel sank its fangs into the finger of a freshman who had been attempting to feed it popcorn kernels inside his dorm room. Another student (bizarrely described as “the ice cream champion of the University”) attempted rescue, but was no match for the ensuing battle: “A few minutes later he retired with his gloves torn to shreds and his hands lacerated in a dozen places, leaving the squirrel in complete triumph,” concluded the story’s unattributed writer.
Student journalists around the country have since kept a watchful eye for any unusual happenings from the squirrel community.
At Columbia University, reporters in 2012 covered a string of pizza burglaries perpetrated by squirrels as a “somewhat magical occurrence.”
“The victim reported that she ‘sensed a squirrel right behind,’ her, and watched sadly as the theft was carried out,” they said. “We await the next inevitable attack with a mix of horror and fascination.”
In Pennsylvania at Penn State that same year, students and squirrels enjoyed a much more affectionate camaraderie. One freshman named Mary who spent her free time crafting hats for the squirrels earned a newspaper profile as the “Penn State Squirrel Whisperer” in the newspaper. “She likes the attention that the squirrels get but has to make sure to keep an eye on them because she doesn’t want them to just start going berserk,” the writer explained. For the writer, this stance was “understandable considering while I watched from afar, squirrels were climbing on her, sitting on her forearm and generally gathering around her.”
At some institutions, some squirrels have become so notable that their deaths merit an obituary. In 2007, reporters at The North Texan issued a grim headline entitled “‘Baby’ is no more” to announce the untimely passing of the University of Northern Texas’ best-known rodent resident.
“The albino squirrel informally known as Baby, who enjoyed a good two years on campus between the University Union and Scoular Hall, died Aug. 21 in an unfortunate encounter with a red-tailed hawk,” they wrote. “The squirrel, thought to be a good luck charm for students who passed him on their way to take exams, was quite the celebrity.”
The squirrels’ notoriety suggests their status as charismatic megafauna—a term for the large, instantly recognizable animals that gain sympathy, symbolism and popularity among humans. Relatability is a key factor of animal charisma, as Zoo Atlanta mammal curator Stephanie Braccini explained to HowStuffWorks via email. So when we watch them play in our gathering spaces or devour our french fries, students might interpret connections to their own lived experience.
College campuses aren’t home to exotic animals like lions, manatees and pandas who are among the most well-known examples of charismatic megafauna. But campuses are also no longer habitable for many of the native species that would otherwise live there. The monoculture grass lawns that expand through fold-out admission brochures are like a desert for local creatures: there’s no food, no water and harsh cycles of disturbance caused by mowing and pest management campaigns. Eastern Gray Squirrels are among the only native mammals who can hold out against these conditions.
It makes sense, then, why squirrels might be a perennial subject of fascination — they’re the only easily-observable critter around for long.
Unlike Oberlin, Princeton, Lehigh and 56 more schools cited as having a student-squirrel cultural symbiosis, Allegheny is not particularly enthralled with its squirrels. My suspicion is that the charismatic captains of our local ecology are instead the worms.
I found out about Meadville’s worms almost immediately during the first real rainstorm of my freshman year. The widest, longest, slimiest, wriggliest earthworms I’d ever seen in my entire life flopped out that day onto the sidewalk en masse. YikYak flooded with emoji hearts and capital letters announcing the beasts’ rise to the surface. People squealed in disgust while walking to class, even as they stooped to fling the worms’ spineless, squishy bodies off the treacherous sidewalk and into the grass. For days their fallen brethren were mourned with the occasional regretful wail at the sight of an especially large dry annelid. This was not an isolated incident as I’d first thought — it happens each time it rains.
The same metrics that other campuses point to as indicators of their squirrel populations’ remarkability — urban legends of their vast size and population, folklore alleging sightings as good luck symbols and newspaper coverage — hold true for Allegheny’s worms, but not our bushy-tailed above-ground vertebrates.
While writing this article I searched the DSpace archives for every instance of the word “squirrel” published by The Campus between 2000 and 2024 and found nothing to suggest the kind of celebrity these creatures enjoy at other schools (it was mostly references to Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh). Meanwhile, The Campus’ annual April Fools issue, The Compost, is literally named for prime worm real estate.
Worms are on the minds of both Campus writers and their interviewees with surprising regularity. When then-President-elect Noah Tart, ’22, was interviewed in April 2021 about his administration’s cabinet picks, he highlighted expanding their services to campus as the main priority for his Director of Sustainability and Environmental Affairs nominee Andi Reiser, ’23. “Within academia, we are a pretty highly-ranked school for environmental science, and (Reiser) had some incredible ideas,” he said. “She ran the June Cup initiative, and now she wants to do worm compost, which is highly sustainable.”
That following fall, The Campus punctuated a story about the Student Art Society’s zine workshops with a quote from that year’s SAS President Erin Magnus, ’23.“I had a song stuck in my head about worms so I just made a zine about worms,” Magnus said
Creeping deeper through the last few years, it appears that variations of the phrase “open a can of worms” occurred twice within the span of a few issues; a writer also proudly described herself as a “bookworm.” Associate Professor of Biology and Biochemistry Brad Hersh lauded the microscopic worm species C. elegans for being “really quite cool because they are transparent” in 2020. Former Editor-in-Chief Roman Hladio, ’22, combed the internet for thoughts from roundworm experts (also called nematologists, in case you’re searching for a new career path) about the ancient worms unearthed from melting Russian permafrost.
Could it be that Allegheny’s increased focus on planting native vegetation, embracing vermicompost and introducing less invasive land management techniques have created the prerequisite conditions for this movement?
When it rains at Allegheny, the worms rise to the surface, and so do everyone’s feelings about them. In honor of World Earthworm Day (which took place this Monday, Oct. 21), I asked a few members of the Allegheny community for their thoughts on the campus worms. Here’s what they had to say.
Natalie Kocherzat, ’24: “Wormy weather…rainy days.”
Wes Price, ’28: “I mean, earthworms are just kind of incredible creatures. They help break down matter and create beautiful plants and flowers that bloom, and they’re just as much a resident of campus as we are. And I wouldn’t want to live on a campus without earthworms.”
Beth Ma, ’26: “Thoughts on earthworms: I like them. They’re great. I always like to see them pop up. Don’t step on them.”
Alleghenians have always seen themselves reflected in the cold-blooded, unnerving and downright freaky creatures of the world (see also: hellbenders, alligators), which, especially when combined with the whole major/minor combination deal, should tell us a lot about our collective identity. The way we dig our earthworm neighbors represents an unlikely combination of relatability and respect for the utilitarian role they play in making the world habitable — so rock on, worm fans.
World Earthworm Day took place on Monday, October 21. Got thoughts about the campus worms? Share them with the writer at [email protected].
