A squirrel named Hugh stands on the curb in front of Wells Quad. He’s perched on the edge between grass and East Third Street where cars rush down the road.
Behind Hugh are five people who have worked for the past hour to make sure he doesn’t cross. But it doesn’t matter, there are nuts on the other side, and he’s a squirrel.
He runs into the street. A foot hits the brakes.
“Oh my god, wait. No, no!” someone yells.
Hugh scampers safely to the other side.
The Squirrel Club at IU is trying to stop squirrels from crossing Third Street to get nuts. Members are stockpiling walnuts near Wells Quad so the squirrels don’t have to. The club has moved about 6,400 walnuts since last week.
Emily Jones, president of the club, has been keeping an eye on IU’s squirrels since she was a freshman in 2013. She hasn’t studied squirrels formally, but said she’s confident her extensive time observing – and naming – them, paired with her own research, has helped her understand their behavior.
A little more than a week ago, two things happened that caused squirrels to cross East Third Street more frequently than usual.
First, temperatures suddenly dropped. The low temperature was 37 degrees Oct. 12, according to the National Weather Service, and temperatures have continued to stay down. Jones said the sudden cold caused the squirrels to scramble to pack in extra warmth by binge-eating walnuts.
Second, and more specific to the squirrel community near Wells Quad, a lot of walnuts dropped right on and in front of the lawn at the Kappa Kappa Gamma house across the street.
Jones noticed, and made a post to the club’s Instagram page, @squirrels_of_iu, asking followers to help move the walnuts from outside the Kappa Kappa Gamma house to Wells Quad. The post got 767 likes and 47 comments as of Tuesday night. The next day, four people met to help move the nuts.
Operation Walnut, as Jones deemed it, was in motion.
Sara Couch, a 2016 alumna, has been helping round up walnuts and create piles across the street. Couch first heard about the Squirrel Club at IU last year when the IDS wrote a story about it.
“When I saw that squirrels were possibly getting squished, I got concerned,” Couch said.
The piles of walnuts are scattered throughout Wells Quad, their convenient bounty filling a small part of each squirrel’s territory. The piles have to be spread out to keep the squirrels from fighting over them, which could potentially push squirrels back across Third Street, Couch said.
The walnuts were dumped in large piles or thrown from tote bags at random. Couch said she felt like Johnny Appleseed. By the time they were done, Jones' right hand was stained yellow and orange from the walnuts.
Along with the walnuts, Jones said a Bloomington resident donated 100 pounds of acorns to be dumped behind Wells Quad. The next day, Jones said a full duffel bag worth of acorns was gone.
While volunteers collected walnuts along the grass strip separating the sidewalk from the road, cars race by a few feet away.
“This is why squirrels are getting run over,” senior Stephanie Sanchez said.
There were 75 car crashes along Third Street between Jan. 1 and Sept. 25, making it the street with the most crashes of any campus road.
Jones said she’s thinking of asking the city of Bloomington to put up a squirrel crossing sign.
But making sure squirrels don’t get flattened isn’t just about nuts, the club is also working to actively deter squirrels from the south side of the street. Jones poured a homemade mix of chili powder and water into holes where squirrels buried nuts to deter them from returning.
Jones said the scent is intended to keep them away from crossing to the south side of Third Street.
She also used a rosemary oil spray along the stone ledge in front of Wells Quad to keep squirrels away from the street. She said squirrels avoided the area after she sprayed it.
Hugh is Couch’s favorite. She said she takes pity on the little guy because he’s not the smartest. Hugh will often steal from other squirrels because he can’t find his own food.
“There’s something about them that makes me feel positive in a dismal world,” Couch said.
But Charlotte, affectionately called Char, remains closest to Jones. She was one of the first squirrels Jones started watching back in 2013.
Squirrels started out as a coping mechanism for Jones when she first came to college, dealing with all the anxieties that come with freshman year. She said being able to pick them out of the crowd and chill out with them was healthy.
“They’re like little people,” Jones said.
The nuts will stop falling in a few weeks, which will likely be the end of Operation Walnut, Jones said. Jones is in the midst of filing to have the Squirrel Club at IU officially recognized by the University, but she will have to say goodbye soon. She’s on track to graduate in December and plans to get out of Indiana.
For now, though, Jones can remain the squirrels’ protector.
A few weeks ago, Jones was in her one of her music classes when she had a bad feeling about Charlotte. After class, she went to check on her and saw that she was about to cross East Third Street by the Jordan Hall greenhouse.
Jones ran toward Charlotte’s flickering tail to cut her off, but Charlotte got around her and ran into traffic.
An SUV ground to a halt in front of Charlotte while making eye contact with Jones. The SUV narrowly avoided hitting the squirrel.
“Do you know what you just did?” Jones yelled at Charlotte.
But Jones knows she can’t always be there.
“They’re very strong-willed when it comes to walnuts or nuts,” Jones said. “I’ve accepted that if something happens, it happens.”
