Pretty much each day we throw out food scraps in the
preparation of our meals. These then go
out into the meadow where deer, squirrels, chipmunks and a sundry of other
animals gather to feast on these items of interest. It is what I call the “Starving Time” for the
deer where little remains of the forest vegetation, that is for them to eat at this time of the winter. So, leaving scraps for them is
important. My thoughts go back to the
time I was cross-country skiing in a state park near New Ulm, Minnesota. My memories still haunt me when seeing dying
deer being hauled away from the park by state employees. Sadness filled my heart when seeing that nothing could be
done for them at that time, and so now we do our part in helping the animals
during this most difficult time of winter.
It is not unusual to have more than birds gathering at our
window feeders each day, especially now when the forest pickings are rare. More times than I want to think about,
squirrels are jumping from the woodpile, and then to the electric box, and from there to the
tube bird feeder. I have written this
before in previous posts about how their attempts are varied in leaping the
distance to the feeder. Roughly half the
time they make it, while the other attempts are not so successful. Even as I am writing now, Abby is in the background
yelling, “The superhero is flying through the air once again!” Abby is bouncing up and down telling me how
when the squirrel saw her, it leaped into the air and flew to the ground in a
giant jump, leaving the tube feeder to bang against the window with a
thump. I now have to remind Abby that
others are still sleeping and that her excitement needs to be curbed, so that
others can rest longer. She has given
this particular squirrel the name, “Scrat” after the one in Ice Age the
movie.
Lately, we have had red, black and grey squirrels making the
jump to the feeder. Yesterday I was
about to scare a grey squirrel from the tube feeder when another black squirrel
came flying through the air knocking the grey head over heals in the other direction. The black not noticing me, started to feast
on the seeds when all of a sudden it looked up staring intently at me, it
expression was so funny, it seemed to be saying, “What are you looking
at?” I then opened the window and it
very reluctantly left its prize to join the other squirrels on the ground.
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| While writing this post Scrat jumped to the feeder. |
I have tried this last week in dissuading the squirrels to
leave the tube feeder alone by moving it twice, that is, further away from
their launch point on the side of the house.
This has yielded little results.
These tenacious little fur balls have still made the leap to the
feeder. In the beginning, they missed
quite frequently, and it was amusing to see them summersault through the void, grasping at only air, but this did not deter them in the least. At one point, “Scrat” tried to climb the
glass in the attempt of shimming to its left, all the while trying to get closer to the
feeder. This too ended in failure as the sounds of claws screeching like
fingers on a chalk board made their way into abyss below. It was quite amusing though watching this
experiment in futility, claws flailing at the glass, and the desperate
expression on the squirrel’s face, all the time seeing in it’s eyes, the fact
that it was resigning itself to the under-region once more. In other attempts, we watched the squirrels
try to climb the wood siding, scratching helplessly at the frozen smooth wooden
boards. We would listen as the scratches
would begin slowly, and then in a panic of flailing noises, we next would hear a
thump, now knowing that it landed on the ground disappointed that it had another
failure to its attempts.
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| As we watched Scrat, the black squirrel here, leaped to feeder causing Scrat to go flying. |
Yesterday, I thought of putting honey in the tray where the
successful squirrels sat as they ravaged the bird feeder. I thought this would be a humane way of
dissuading them from revisiting a site that had become very sticky to them all of a
sudden. I imagined individual squirrels later
asking their mates to extract the honey in places that only another squirrel
could reach. This theory of mine only
proved a failure as well. By the end of the day,
the honey was completely gone, and I realized that they must really like this
gooey substance. The only consolation is
that they might be asking me for our cat’s hairball medication soon.
All in all, they are tenacious little creatures. Perhaps this though is well deserved rewards for their prize, (getting the bird feed) since they offer our family a great
form of amusement. The birds on the
other hand might look at this whole scenario in quite a different light. For myself, I imagine other forest animals
watching through the trees, and seeing what is transpiring between the
squirrels and myself as an amusing form of futility, on both our parts. Come to think of it, with us leaving the
forest animals food, they might look at both the squirrels and myself as
something wonderful, “Dinner and a Show!”
