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Squirrels, I fumed as I scanned the trees: never around when you need one.

I had written a story about the Central Park Squirrel Census, the first known attempt to count every squirrel in the 840 acres that make up the most popular park in the country.

Improbable as this project seemed, hundreds of volunteers enlisted. On Sunday afternoon, I joined them.

A dozen of us gathered at a stone archway near the north end of the park. The Squirrel Census Commander, Jamie Allen, assigned each person a 100-by-100 meter square, handed out maps, clipboards and tally sheets, and instructed us to take careful notes.

“When you see a squirrel, you’re going to watch it for 30 seconds to a minute,” he advised. “It’s going to do a lot in that time.”

The census-takers have spotted more than 800 squirrels so far. But I had drawn a tough sector — the park’s northwest corner, at the busy intersection of the Upper West Side and Harlem. Some of my square lay outside the park itself, a fluke of boundary-drawing that Mr. Allen assured me did not matter because any squirrels I saw that close to the park lived inside it.

I walked the perimeter of my square, marveling at the range of non-squirrel activity: a teenager doing wheelies on 110th Street, http://goodforheavypeople.com/ kids skating around the statue of Frederick Douglass in the traffic circle, a man hunched over a trash bag sorting through pieces of unidentifiable 1980s office equipment.

A woman pulled down balloon-festooned signs advertising an open house for a three-bedroom condo. A boy with superhero face paint took his mother’s hand as they descended the subway stairs. A sparrow flitted and skipped beneath a hedge. No squirrels.

Just inside the park, children sprinted across a playground and a scraggly cairn terrier strained at his leash. A crow flew overhead, lit on a black locust tree and flew off again.

Beside the playground loomed a mighty oak, at least 40 feet tall. I stopped, listened, looked for telltale movements in the canopy. Watched for falling acorns. I craned my neck until it hurt, but saw no squirrels.

No squirrel perched on the rim of a trash can nibbling a discarded crust. No squirrel chased another down the trunk of a ginkgo tree. New York’s aggressively cute, cutely aggressive park mascot had suddenly turned elusive.

I looped up a dirt path and onto the 110th Street bridge and peered down glumly into the tops of silent trees.

I checked the time. The 25-minute period I was supposed to spend canvassing had passed. I took a few reluctant steps back toward the rendezvous point when I saw a cyclist stopped by the side of West Drive, pointing his camera at something. I followed his line of sight and saw a rustle in the grass.

Up the little rise came Sciurus carolinensis in all its perky-eared, bushy-tailed woodland majesty, a splendid specimen with cinnamon highlights in its gray coat.

The squirrel took a few steps, pawed at the ground, looked up for danger, and repeated the sequence, in that twitching stop-start way.

Then it rose onto its hind legs and appeared — I have blown up and slowed down and rewatched the video like the Zapruder footage — to take a step forward in an upright position, before arching like a diver and leaping onto its front paws.

As if to celebrate, the squirrel paused and executed a saucy tail dance, leftrightleftrightleftrightleftright, that would put a touchdown-scoring running back to shame.

With that, it bounded into the weeds and headed down the embankment, toward the shouts of children echoing from the tire swing below.

I drew a 1 in the corner of my map and headed back to rejoin the others.

The Central Park Squirrel Census ends on Saturday. Alas, all volunteer slots are filled.

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