There’s nothing more powerful in the outdoors on a calm day than a squirrel for those of us who find ourselves on the deer stand. Whether it’s the scuttling in the leaves on the floor of the woods, or the rustling of small branches coming with a leap from tree to tree in a shelterbelt along a farm field, the big sounds generated by these little animals sets all hunters on edge.

For me, they’re welcome company in the slow hours, watching them move with relative grace, ascending and spiraling around the trunks of cottonwoods, boxelders and oaks, before descending upside down along the bend in the tree before jumping and turning with gymnast-like ability to hit the ground on all four feet.

I’ve had close encounters, where curiously, a gray squirrel has come to within an arm’s reach of my stand location before suddenly realizing with all sorts of wide-eyed terror that my camo pattern and the gentle rise and fall of my chest was definitely not something associated with the tree I was hanging on. In those far encounters, I’ve watched pairs of the bushy-tailed rodents chase after one another, whether in courtship or in defense of territory (or perhaps a sweet stash of acorns at the base of the tree below them). Whether gray or fox varieties in the belts of the farmed plains, or the smaller red squirrel, which always seems to be annoyed with my presence in the woods of northern Minnesota, I always find comfort in their presence and often think of them as a harbinger of things to come — even if they do serve as nature’s alarm system.

Generally, it seems that if squirrels are moving, so is the rest of the wild world. The percussion of their skittering footsteps is often accompanied by the tunes of the morning birds while I’m on stand. The chickadee firing up its song and the nuthatch and its hoppy quiet notes are usually the melody that surrounds a squirrel’s motion as dawn takes hold of the landscape. When I see deer in the spots I sit, I often rise from my seated position to ready myself for half an hour on my feet as these auditory cues signal an increase in animal activity, because I know their footsteps will soon follow the motion of the resident squirrels and the other animals that wake with them heading to their daytime bedding areas.

In the afternoon and evening as well, when the winds of mid-day begin to dip and a calm comes over the ravines and tree claims I hunt, I listen for the movement of squirrels in the draw and watch for motion in the canopy to signal that same twilight uptick which comes with evening’s approach. The crow of a rooster pheasant, or the twittering of a late season pair of mourning doves as they take flight to find food or water often adds to the list of noises that start with the moving squirrels and hopefully end with the approach of a whitetail buck.

Typically, though, squirrels provide me with some animal company when things are slow. Their movements mean a rush of adrenaline and their presence provides a focal point — which more than a handful of times has distracted me from the entrance of a deer into my hunting area — and something to pass the time observing. While I’ve never hunted them, I could see how they’d be a worthy quarry: alert, attentive to motion, and able to pick up and call out those things, like a fidgety bow hunter on stand. I always feel if I can sit still enough to not tip them off and evoke a storm of chattering alert calls, that’s a big enough win on any bow hunting trip … in our outdoors.