What Was Noah Thinking?

Squirrels:  Are they my least favorite mammal?  Maybe, maybe not.  It depends on who’s living under my deck at the moment.  Raccoons or skunks?  One time I had a woodchuck, another an opossum.  But are any of them as unrelenting as squirrels?  Well, okay, yeah, they are.  But let’s get back to my “pet” peeve of the moment: Squirrels.

I’m lucky enough to have a deck.  And on that deck I have a table.  Most people would use that table to eat outside when the weather is just right, maybe after a barbecue, have friends over, enjoy a lemonade or two.  I use it for my pots.  Not my pot pots.  My flower pots.

Every year I go to the greenhouse and get a flat of annuals to plant in the six flower pots on my table.  I select them carefully because I delight in the hummingbirds that swoop down for the nectar.

Overlooking my deck is a huge oak tree, which last year provided an abundance of acorns.  Now, I didn’t mind when the squirrels stored their acorns in my flower pots after the diminution of my annuals.  But I do mind, when in the late spring, after I’ve carefully planted my pots with a variety of flowering annuals, that the squirrels dive into the pots, uprooting my plants so that I have to plant and replant and replant again.

Will the snapdragons survive?  It doesn’t look like it.

Is this all that upsets me about squirrels?  Hardly.  I’m not a prude, but when I sit at my desk, working on the computer, and look out the window to see squirrels copulating, I feel a deep disgust rising in my gorge.  Have those ugly, little, gray creatures no sense of modesty?  The only way I know the raccoons have mated is when I see the mother and four or five babies traipsing out from under my deck.

I have a bird feeder, that now lies empty due to avian flu and the warnings from the county about not filling the feeder quite yet.  I love the birds that come to my feeder.  Well, let me qualify that to say some birds that come to my feeder.  These house wrens are voracious.  I have the sort of feeder that closes if anything heavy tries to eat from it.  Take that, you grackles.  This doesn’t stop the squirrels.

My feeder hangs from a dead branch on my oak tree, the only branch I can reach.  While squirrels cannot eat directly from the feeder, that doesn’t stop them from climbing the oak tree, venturing onto the dead branch and jumping to shake seeds from the feeder.  When they are dissatisfied with this effort, they slither down the pole and rock on the feeder to disperse the seeds.  Haven’t they stored enough acorns?  In my pots!  I sigh in frustration.

I realize that squirrels are extremely popular in children’s literature.  One can only attribute that to the fact that there are so many of them that parents can easily point them out to their children. The zoo comes to them.  But my yard is not a zoo.  Well, okay, it is.  (I failed to mention the deer and the coyotes in the paragraph above.). However I don’t want the squirrels in my yard, on my bird feeder, in my flower pots. Is this an unreasonable request?  I think not!