Robsquirrel

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

It started with the guinea pigs.  We got two guinea pigs, both female, for Marshall’s 4th birthday.  We kept them in the enclosed back porch, in a little glass aquarium.  (The book on cavy care said that cages were dangerous because they could catch their little feet and lose toes.  I’ve since decided it was wrong and that’s why the little ones died prematurely.  Even with best cleaning in the world, it wasn’t ventilated.  But our story is from before that….)

When spring came, apparently female guinea pigs thoughts lightly turned to thoughts of whoopee.  At least I presume that the guinea pigs woke up and lo, realized they were alone and there were no cute boy cavies around.  So, they did what came naturally.

This means we woke up late in the night with a sound like weeeeek, weeeek, week – reminiscent of the psycho shower scene.

Understandably alarmed, we rushed downstairs to see if by chance the guinea pigs had installed a mini-shower in the aquarium, because you never know, and were knifing each other.

No.  Both girls were standing in the middle of the aquarium (the lid was netting) giving full throat vent to what I presume were mating cries and sounded like a particularly annoying car alarm.

We tried to calm them down and when that failed, we went back upstairs and slept with our pillows over our head.

We thought that was all.

The problem, you see, is that they kept doing this for a month.  And the year being rather warm, we had the windows open.

We did not know the danger we were courting.

A month or so later, Petronius the Arbiter the Old Firm’s (we call the old set of cats the Old Firm) Resident Evil TM who was always inside/out because no walls could contain him (you only think I’m joking.  If he’d not been surgically incapable, he’d have sired every kitten in a forty mile radius.  As was, we had to keep a certificate of neutering because of owners of females who came to our door demanding we take half the kittens.) got in a fight with something bigger than him and had to be brought inside for healing.

The sick room was the powder room in the attic, next to my office, where he was – as he always did when he was sick – behaving as though he were a poor, decrepit and inoffensive cat.  I’d like to point out that whenever he got in one of his epic fights (he fought a car at least once.  No, don’t ask.  I’m not sure he didn’t win, either) the vet  would cooperate with this act by shaking his head and saying that poor Pete was probably not long for this world.  And three days later, Pete was outside again, talking up the girls and running every tom off the neighborhood. (His skin was held together with scar tissue, and his vocabulary was ¾ cursing and ¼ spitting.  He was full of guile and malice … and he let Robert drag him around by his tail, and sleep with his head on him as though Pete were a pillow.  I like to imagine it’s because Robert had a heart so pure the cat forebore to strike.  Don’t ask me what I think in my darker hours.)

So, anyway, here he is in this tiny room in the attic, and we had to go out to run errands for the afternoon, so I told Dan I’d just go check on Pete.

I go up the stairs to the attic, and I hear this awful choke-gasp, choke-gasp.  I will right here and now confess my reaction to suffering comes in two modes.  Either I go hyper cool or I lose my head.  This time, I lost my head.  I didn’t finish going upstairs, and instead came down screaming and crying and going “Dan, Pete is having a heart attack or something.”  (Note that I hadn’t even opened the door to the powder room – in retrospect a good thing.)

Dan comes running up – true story, he once left a meeting and risked being sacked because Pete had got stung by a bee (he was deathly allergic) and we only had a car.  So Dan came home and grabbed Pete and we took him for a shot.  As Dan is on his way back to work, I get a phone call because from his reaction they thought Pete was our son – opens the door…

Instead of ailing, Pete has cornered… a squirrel.  The horrible sounds are the squirrel spitting defiance and Pete.  Pete is so startled by this – bears didn’t spit defiance at Pete – that he’s not leaping for the kill.  Dan is stunned too… which means the squirrel runs out between Dan’s legs and to the little office across the way, where Dan did our financial stuff.  We close the door, so Pete doesn’t chase the squirrel over the receipts and stand there not knowing what to do.

Here I should add this is Manitou Springs, which means that squirrels are potential carriers of the black plague.  We call animal control who says “Manitou?  You’ve got to be kidding me. Squirrels have the black plague.  Don’t touch him.”

Which is all very well supposing we wanted to play ambush with a squirrel in the office for the rest of his natural life.  Also, you know, Pete is going to catch him sooner or later and I understand the IRS is notoriously averse to blood-soaked tax returns, even from writers (Possibly particularly from writers.  That whole, can’t get blood from a turnip thing.)

Meanwhile the squirrel has made it into my office and his hiding in a bookcase behind a row of books.  We call animal control again.  I don’t think we threatened to take the animal control officer and make him eat the squirrel, but that was the gist of it.  So he tells us… to open the door wherever the squirrel is, and make a path to the exit where he can’t veer elsewhere.

Now, this was a Victorian.  We were in the attic.  Down a flight of stairs was the bedroom floor, where all doors closed off from a long hallway.  Then there was another long flight of stairs, leading to the front door.  To the right was the living room doorway which had no door.  To the left was the library which had a door, and down the hallway, opposite the front door was the kitchen and the back porch, both open.

So I get cardboard boxes and boards and put them in front of every possible exit….

And we open the door and try to scare the squirrel down.  (We should have loosed the Pete.)

Squirrel comes out of my office, goes into the bills office.  He finds the one hole in Dan’s antique desk, and ensconces himself in the drawer – where he sits screaming defiance at us.

I did what any sane writer would do – I went nuts.  (The definition of a sane writer is, he/she is just below going nuclear at any time.)  I ran to the phone and started madly dialing private animal control people.

One of them finally agreed to come over d*mn the black plague.

So he comes in and he looks like an older Indiana Jones.  We have cardboard blockages still up, on the off chance he can chase the squirrel down the stairs.  He looks at us like we’re nuts (Indiana Jones and the temple of cardboard) and tells us that “Nah, I’m going to gas him.”

By this time our adorable moppets, then aged eight and four, are aware of the squirrel in the attic TM and think of him as a sort of additional pet.

Indiana Animal Controller assure the boys he’s not going to kill the squirrel.  He’s just going to put him to sleep.  I wonder if this is true, but at the point I don’t care.

The squirrel keeps telling us to come at him, all together or in single file, but he won’t get out of the drawer – the coward.

So, the animal control guy brings in a gas canister, and starts pumping gas into the drawer.  The chattering increases.

After half an hour he looks concerned.  “I risk killing him if I give any more gas” he says.  At this point I’m concerned enough that I – the woman who steps carefully over beetles on the sidewalk – said “I don’t care.”

So he pumps more gas in there.  The chattering continues. Indiana Jones in the Temple of Squirrel looks scared by this supernatural resistance to gas.  “I’ve never in fourteen years…”

So he stops pumping gas and I’m afraid that he’s going to leave and leave us stuck with super squirrel.  I should have remembered we were in the west.  “Ah, no,” he said.  “I’m going to lasso him.”

I don’t think I looked doubtful, but I probably did.  The squirrel is still yelling.

Indiana Animal Control puts on thick leather gloves, gets a little rope lasso.  Opens the drawer a little.  I’m thinking “yeah, right.”

Super squirrel is not stupid.  He doesn’t make for the opening.  So, Indiana reaches in…  The squirrel surges out, and with his third hand (do you have a better explanation) the animal control guy lassoes him, and grabs him.  The squirrel is biting him and going nuts but Indiana has leather gloves.  He dumps the squirrel in an animal carrier.

“We’re going to move him,” he says.  “To x neighborhood.  Plenty of squirrels there.”

The kids ask to say goodbye to the squirrel and are allowed to look through the bars at the prisoner who is still chattering defiance.  No word on whether he was holding up a little fist and chattering “I will be back.”

So…  Five years later we move to… the same neighborhood.  I have no proof that the old squirrel who used to dance on the fence and taunt our cats – battered, beaten, one eye missing – was the same one that had come in and – clearly – tried to rescue our guinea pigs from durance vile.

And I will not mention that sometimes I see squirrels acting oddly military on the garage roof.  I could be wrong.  Maybe there is no Rodent Liberation Front.

Or I could be right.  And they could be watching me.

UPDATE: Different Post — a Chapter of Elf Blood — At MG C

 

110 thoughts on “Robsquirrel”

  3. Ah, the color of that squirrel? I have heard that there are some grey foreign invaders on parts of this continent, subjugating and driving away our nicer red ones. Well, the red ones are thieves, and saboteurs (clothes left outside to dry sometimes shredded for their nests, occasionally food from the kitchen when I was a kid if mother left the window open, often enough cutting electricity to a lot of humans with those suicide missions) but according to rumors those grey ones are even worse.

    Like

      1. Ah-ha.

        By the way, how solid do you think that rodent movement is? Considering how different colored squirrels seem to treat each other it may not be that bad a threat – unless they can keep it together when it comes to unifying against a common enemy, like humans.

        In which case you maybe should be careful this news does not reach the rodents living there: a part of Turku has developed bit of a rat problem, and now there is finally going to be a counterstrike. The usual, poisoning and traps. If you want to see a clip about actual rats in trees (seems to be autoplay and is in Finnish, one of the guys interviewed is a resident saying he is going to move from that part of the town because of the rats, and one is one of the pest control people. Also a couple of views of the late summer Aura river):

        http://www.ts.fi/tstv/?id=29338181&type=recordvideo

        Like

      2. Did it have tufted ears? Those are “Albert’s Squirrels”, and are mostly found in the mountains. They are more aggressive than the red (fox) squirrels found in most of the city.

        When I was a kid, squirrels were a major part of our fare during the hunting season. I’ve eaten them fried, baked, and in dumplings and gumbo. If things really get desperate, squirrels may become extinct in most American cities. They’re wily little creatures, but very much creatures of habit, and easily snared.

        Like

        1. Things look rough here, I am going to break out a brick of .22 rimfire and pull every treerat out of this block’s trees and smoke ’em. Ought to my household fed for a month.

          Like

          1. Aguila makes the Colibri low energy .22 long rifle cartridge with a 20 grain bullet and no gun powder, just the primer. Out of a long barreled bolt action rifle it’s quieter than an air rifle. Quite effective for squirrel and other rodent control without bothering the neighbors silly liberal heads.

            Like

        2. Once upon a time their pelts were used as money. As well as all the other pelts, but squirrel pelts presumably had something like the value of one dollar a hundred years ago, the basis used for evaluating others. And I have heard of people using squirrel pelt jackets or something like that even relatively recently. Would take a lot of sewing, making one of those, the local ones are pretty small.

          Like

          1. There was once a time when red-blooded American boys routinely ran trap lines, harvesting local squirrel population in order to convert pelts to pocket money. It is evidence of America’s decline that so noble and beneficial an avocation has been enjoined by the ongoing Liberal Project To Castrate Boys.

            Like

            1. Dad had a story about when there was a bob-cat bounty paid for by the county. You had to turn in the ears and cape. One day he was at the courthouse when a gentleman wandered in from the hills with a paper bag filled with the capes and ears of the bob-cats he had trapped over the winter. The rather prissy desk clerk paid him off, and then she picked the bag up like it was filled with dead and smelly things and minced out. Dad says he asked another clerk what they did with the bits. He was told they just tossed it in the incinerator in the basement.

              Like

  4. I had a girlfriend who rented a place in the country. She had two cats, and the one who had been an urban rescue by my co-worker and originally was agoraphobic, turned into the greatest mouser. Unfortunately he would bring his catches into the house to torment to death, and she was always finding desiccated mice in the heater vents and under the sofa. One day the cat came trotting into the bedroom and spat out a chipmunk that immediately ran into the bathroom to hide. It took a day to get that critter out. And that only because he chose to try to go to ground in the toilet brush caddy.

    Like

    1. I once brought a bat inside our house, in a pocket where he remained quite happily until I tried to take a peek in order to find out the species by comparing his looks to a pictures in a book. Then he flew to the kitchen ceiling and hid on top of one of the cabinets. My father put on a pair of leather gloves and got him down, and I returned him to where I had found him (in that same pocket).

      (Rabies has been nearly non-existent here for several decades, so not much of a risk of that.)

      Like

      1. The cat that did not have a rabies shot (my neglect, but he wieghs 7 pounds and can whup me everytime) brought in a bat. I had to take the cat to the vets’ and the bat to the testing lab, and I had to keep the cat inside until I could show that the bat was negative. It it was postitive I would have had to keep the cat in quarantie for 6 months. Cat tore me up a bit getting the furry ingrate into the carrier.

        Like

          1. Indeed, many years ago my wife was in bed with the flu and our cat brought a gopher to her – proudly dropped atop the comforter.

            Like

            1. Many’s the summer mom saved a litter of kittens that were “unsavable”– I was twenty before I found out you’re not SUPPOSED to be able to raise kittens that haven’t opened their eyes– and as a result leaving the house was an adventure. Many, many half eaten little corpses left for “mommy.”

              Like

              1. The reverse isn’t fun either. Our family cat had a strong maternal instinct and decided my sister and I were her “special needs” adopted kittens. She tried to teach us how to hunt by bringing us a wounded mole and chasing it back and forth in front of us, looking up and giving encouraging mews. “Come on, you can do this! Just bite the back of the neck!” Poor little mole…

                Like

            2. Cats are by no means unique in this regard. My late Fuzzy (pictured in the gravatar) was known for bringing in mice and cockroaches for the pack leader’s delectation…..

              Like

      2. I love having bats outside, eating mosquitoes. Every now and then a bat would come down the chimney (we had the roofers install a screen when they re-roofed the house, so no more bats inside) and fly around inside. My husband hates bats so much that he once wrenched his knee trying to hit the bat with a baseball bat. After that, I was designated bat-remover, if the cats didn’t get the bat before I did. (Our cats are current on rabies shots just because of this.) I would stalk the bat and scoop it up (or down, as the case may be) in a towel and take it outside where bats belong. It would usually be a few months before the next bat came inside.

        One night, I was getting ready to take a shower, and heard a fluttering sound when I closed the bathroom door. Sure enough, there was a bat in the bathroom (bat-room?). I took one of my towels and after a few moments had the bat safely wrapped up. It was making that sound that they do, complaining that I had it trapped. I walked out to my husbands computer room and said, “I caught a bat in the bathroom. It belongs outside.”

        He didn’t look up from his keyboard when he said “I thought I heard something.”

        “I’m naked” I said. He got up, walked past me to the door, opened it and looked around outside.

        “It’s ok, there’s no one out here.” There was no way he was going to take the towel full of upset bat and put it outside for me. So, I went out onto our back porch and shook the bat out of the towel. Then I put that towel in the laundry hamper and got a fresh one to use after my shower. After my shower, I noticed our neighbor’s back porch light on, and they were on their porch for some time, but I never heard anything from them about the Great Nude Bat Capture and Release, so I hope they really weren’t around when I was releasing the bat.

        Like

          1. Every evening at six o’clock a bat would fly through the upstairs window fly into the next bedroom, around the ground floor and out the door. It would eat all the bugs and we would sleep well that night. We left the window and the front door open for it. ;-)

            Like

  6. Ominous voiceover: “They thought he was dead. They were wrong. DEAD wrong.”

    Extreme closeup: scary squirrel face.

    Coming, August 2014: Squirrel. Tagline: Vengeance is Nuts

    Like

        1. If only I was a filmmaker, I’d totally make this into a fake trailer. It cries out for it.

          Like

    2. Would he then rescue one or both of those poor imprisoned (and deprived, unable to fulfill some pressing needs) girls?

      Wait, I know. One of the girls will turn out to be a traitor, but will have a turn of heart in the last minute and die tragically while saving the hero’s life, then the hero will ride into the sunset with the good one. (Yes, so maybe it didn’t happen like that in real life, but we ARE talking about ‘inspired by’, not actual biography here, aren’t we?)

      Like

  7. While the squirrel story is hilarious, I’m afraid this comment has nothing to do with it. Pardon my taking over your comments section for a soapbox, Sarah, but I think you’ll agree that this is important:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324108204579023143974408428.html

    I found this story disturbing enough (holding the CEO personally responsible for a $57 million bill, piercing the corporate veil when there was no malfeasance or illegal activity of any kind? Can’t see that as anything but personal retaliation) that I wrote a letter to my Senator, Ted Cruz. Who just happens to be on the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Insurance — the subcommittee that, if anything is going to be done about the bureaucratic overreach the article is about, would be the ones getting the ball rolling. Cruz is one of the very, VERY few politicians that hasn’t let me down. (Yet. I’m sure he will at some point, even at many points, but he seems likely to do so less than most other politicians. Yes, that’s damning with faint praise.)

    If any of the Huns and Hoydens reading this are as disturbed by this article as I was, I suggest you also contact your senators and bring the article to their attention. Especially if your senator is one of the ones on the following list (the membership list of the relevant subcommittee):

    Claire McCaskill (D-MO)
    Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
    Mark Pryor (D-AR)
    Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
    Richard Blumenthal (D-CT)
    Brian Schatz (D-HI)

    Dean Heller (R-NV)
    Roy Blunt (R-MO)
    Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)
    Dan Coats (R-IN)
    Ted Cruz (R-TX)
    Deb Fischer (R-NE)

    Good luck getting your senator to care about this if you live in Missouri or California, but those in Texas will likely have better luck. And the more letters they get, the better — because even if they’re big-government statists like most of those on that list whose names I recognize, at least the outpouring of small-government support might worry them a little and make them less likely to oppose, say, a bill that a small-government person like Cruz might bring to the floor.

    It has been said many times before, but I will say it again: the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I have no personal connection the CEO mentioned in this article, but if I don’t do what I can to defend his liberty, how can I expect my own liberty to be defended when, ten or twenty or thirty years down the road, I find myself in the crosshairs of a vindictive bureaucracy? (And I expect that that will happen at some point). So I did what I could — write to my Senator, and try to bring this to wider attention — and I hope you too will do what you can.

    Again, Sarah, my apologies for using your blog as a temporary soapbox. I’ll get off the box now, and clean up the spilled detergent powder before it gets ground into the carpet.

    Like

    1. I read this yesterday. I thought it was totally absurd then, and I still feel the Fed should be hung out to dry about this. The real problem is, there was NO reason for them to go after him to begin with. The best I can come up with is that he MIGHT have been a Republican donor. If that’s the case, it’s past letter-writing time, and time for torches and pitchforks, hot tar and a long pole.

      Like

      1. I think that they’re going after him because he resisted them. The thinking might be that if he’s sufficiently harassed others won’t defy them for fear of similar treatment.

        Like

      2. Here in NC we have long had the problem of electing yin and yang senators. At its worst we had Jesse Helms and John Edwards representing us. As far as government overreach was concerned the former was anti-matter and the latter didn’t matter.

        Like

        1. Better than the brain trust the fraud-by-mail gifts us with here in Washington. I mean, have you heard Patty Murray speak? She makes Obama sound like Aristotle. I keep wondering which one of her interns carries the drool cup.

          Like

          2. Yes, but your former governor* made Murray look intellegent.

            *Those chosen by your blatant ballot fraud makes the conspiracy theorists who claim that the politicians are puppets controlled by some shadowy cabal look entirely too reasonable.

            Like

            1. I keep wondering if I can file suit against the state since the inescapable voter fraud disenfranchises me just as much as a couple of armed thugs standing outside a polling place.

              Like

                1. For accountants performing audits the first step is determining whether there are controls in place to prevent error and fraud, then whether those controls are adequate, appropriate and working. Absent such controls an audit becomes vastly more extensive (and expensive.)

                  The controls might be as simple as requiring cashiers to count their drawer at shift end, or the bookkeeper to balance the cash accounts monthly to requiring ID and key card swipe to enter the inventory storeroom.

                  The sad fact of our voting system is that there is little risk of detecting fraud because there are few controls in effect and most of those are ineffective or unenforced. Having poll watchers from each party is a basic control, but in numerous polling places either the minor party has nobody available to view the voting or their poll watchers are forced out of the polling place (control absent) or prevented from reporting such violations as they might observe (control ineffective.)

                  While a legal argument might be brought on the grounds that the State has a fiduciary obligation to take (at least) minimal steps to protect the value of individuals’ votes, it is highly improbable that the State’s agents — election officers, prosecutors, judges — would grant standing or allow the case to proceed. The first trick would be to deny standing on the grounds that you are unable to prove injury by such presumed fraud because you are unable to prove fraud occurred (see: absence of controls, above.)

                  I trust the lawyers among us would be better able to evaluate the likelihood of succeeding in a class action suit contending that the absence of controls represents a violation of fiduciary obligation, but I expect that is a rather specialized field with ample case law and precedent to facilitate theft.

                  Like

    3. Speaking as someone who saw, and is seeing, what liability law did and is doing, to General Aviation, I quote John McClane from _Die Hard_:: “Welcome to the party, pal!”

      Like

    1. Have you heard the Austin Lounge Lizards’ epic “Rasputin’s HMO”? Funny in a black, medical-insurance sort of way.

      Like

  9. I totally believe in the existence of the RLF. Come hear my tale (or tail…)
    Back in the late ’90s I had a postdoctoral position that involved me being at the Wisconsin Synchrotron, located outside of Madison in the middle of a giant soybean field. Synchrotrons use a LOT of electricity, especially when you are revving them up in the morning, so the facility was pretty much on a first name basis with the power grid people and we had dedicated step-down stations, etc. Until one day. Power just *vanished*. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, so it couldn’t be storm related. Much agitation and running around, possibly some cursing and screaming.

    First report we got was, “A fire took out the transformer station.” OK, what started the fire? Then more information trickled in. They had found the (completely charred) corpse of a squirrel at the station. Several forensic analyses and computer simulations later, they determined the following chain of events.
    1) Suicide RLF member scampers along power line.
    2) SRLF decides he’d rather be on adjoining, parallel power line.
    3) SRLF jumps gracefully, extending long, fluffy tail for elegance and balance.
    4) Tip of tail and paw make contact with respective power lines, creating a (brief) but effective electrical circuit.
    5) SRLF catches fire, retracts tail and/or paw, falls to the ground, and sets the grass below the power lines, nicely dried out by the summer heat, on fire.
    6) raging prairie fire, started by combusting corpse of SRLF, takes out transformer station and thus the entire synchrotron. Damn squirrels…

    Like

    1. Wow, that beats all! I’m familiar with the squirrel/transformer short-out syndrome, having experienced that in an older built-up city of the eastern half of the nation. But as a vector for wildfire … just wow …

      Like

    4. A friend had a cat that would climb power poles to get the birds perched on the line. He survived the first two times he managed to touch both line and pole at the same time while retrieving lunch. (once knocking out power). Apparently getting shocked with 14,000 volts and falling fifty feet takes more than one life at a time however, because the third time it was raining and when the power went out the power company came out to fix it and found both cat and bird at the base of the pole.

      Every time somebody uses the expression, ‘like a cat with its tail in a light socket’ I picture that cat. Frizzed and schorched hair, standing on end, just like in the cartoons.

      Like

      1. That cat really liked its bird lunch. When I was a kid, I had a calico cat, which we had picked up as a stray off of a back road on Catalina Island, that would just sit on the front porch. The mocking birds would show up, and try to drive it away with mock dives and screeches. That cat would just sit there and watch the mocking birds … until one would get too close. Then **whap** up went both paws and down she came with the bird.

        Like

  13. Dear husband wanted to know why I was laughing so hard…. the “COME AT ME!” squirrel got a smile from him. (That’s practically rolling on the floor.)

    Like

  14. Never had much trouble with squirrels – just rats with fuzzy tails. No, it’s the birds that creep me out.

    You see, for some reason birds try to get into the house not too soon before someone in there is going to die, at least on my mom’s side of the family. Great grand mother, great aunts and uncles, grand father, grand mother, and finally my mother, they all had a sparrow or jay fly into or try to get into the house where they were living within a dozen days of their death.

    One tried to get into the house a week or so before my stroke. I’ve had angry men point guns at me and tell me point blank I WAS going to die, faced down a feral pack of hungry pit bulls, almost been run over by an out of control car, and never blinked or got too upset. But damned if that bird didn’t make me sit in my bedroom and rock back and forth a little.

    Obviously I lived through the stroke, … and the heart attack a few months later, … and the bypass a few weeks after that, … and the staph infection I thought was going to take my leg after that – all by my 43 birthday. About the only good thing to come out of it was I lost 50 pounds thanks to the nausea the staph brought on. I look better now than I did in high school even if I can’t really walk a block without a cane. Six weeks of vomiting and not eating is an effective weight loss diet, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

    Maybe I’ve broken the curse, but I still don’t want anything to do with any feckin birds.

    Like

    1. Six weeks of vomiting and not eating is an effective weight loss diet, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

      Yep. My wife didn’t have vomiting with the chemo (they have REALLY good anti-nausea meds these days!), but she hardly had any appetite for those 12 weeks, and she lost 40 lbs.

      Like

  15. My dad grew tomato plants in our backyard. One year we had a positive plague of squirrels, who also like tomatoes. But only in moderation. 2-3 big bites is enough, thank you.

    Finally, there was one lonely survivor just about ripe. My dad goes out one morning to get it…. and it’s gone. He goes back in mutterng….

    An hour later, he’s going out to the car, which is parked under an oak tree. As he opens the car door, there is a somewhat squishy thump and his partially eaten tomato hits the car roof. He looks up and Mr Squirrel is displaying vast amusement.

    For the next few years, he would live trap up to half a dozen squirrels a week, drive them 50 miles out of town, and cut them loose. I pointed out that that is what is known as “creating an ecological niche” for the surrounding squirrel population to fill. He didn’t seem to appreciate my advice, for some reason….

    Like

    1. When building my house, framed but still open, the red squirrels decided it was the perfect spot for their mating rituals and moved in en masse. I just got out the 10-22 and shot any I could catch with a safe backstop. Killed 13 before they gave up. Haven’t bothered us since.

      Like

            1. Not so’s you’d notice. I always tried for the head shot and they were amazingly undamaged by the 22. Except for death, of course.

              Like

                1. The distances weren’t great and I didn’t always hit them first try.
                  Annie Oakley I’m not. Except in fiction. :)

                  Like

    2. At the home prior to this one we had a garden in which we grew tomatoes. The year after Imperious Primo (a mixed breed cat who disdained Maine Coons as puny) passed we learned how valuable his contribution to household happiness had been when the tomato harvest went from Plenty to None. The little grey bastards would perch on the fence to eat their ill-gotten provender, and I cautioned Beloved Spouse that the day was approaching when they would rap on our kitchen window to demand salt, pepper and mayo.

      I think it came from living cheek by jowl with a university, where the students were wont to litter so abundantly that local squirrels had become especially brazen in their theft. I well recall the day when, while crossing campus I watched a squirrel set himself down on the sidewalk to eat an ice cream cone.

      Like

      1. We’ve been having that problem with our apples. They get on the trees and take one or two bites of EACH DAMN APPLE ON THE TREE. It’s like they take a bite, don’t like it, forget what they tasted, and try the next one. I wish I could shoot them with a pellet gun, cause hehehehehehe I’d be hunting squirrels.

        Like

  16. *snort… oh yea, I have seen squirrels, blue jays, and Western scrub jays do things that they are NOT supposed to be able to do… no examples… I am sure you can come up with your own.

    On another note, the last three days the hubby and I escaped the smoke– We are back and ready to battle the smoke again.

    Like

  18. Enter the zombie squirrel. I should preface this by saying that my father has been waging red war on squirrels for the past five years after my folks lost $$$ worth of bulbs to the little [redacted]s. So I am house-sitting for them and guess who starts digging in the garden? Yup. Out comes Ye Olde Squirrelminator, the back door creeeaks open, I line up the iron sights, and “poomf” a blasted hip shot. The beggar gets 2/3 up the tree and falls, flopping like an Italian footballer.

    So I hie myself out to finish of Flopper and put a slug between his eyes. End of flopping, and I leave him for the neighborhood recycling specialist to take care of. EXCEPT . . . not five minutes later Ye Dead Squirrel appears to be reanimated. He’s up in the crotch of the tree. So I reload the Squirrelminator and return to the scene of battle. Nope, that critter is dead as dead can be. I check five more minutes later and he’s still there. The recycling department appears and I poke the corpse out of the tree and it gets carried off to become dinner.

    Never did learn how the deceased got back into the tree.

    Like

    1. What was your recycler?

      What used to annoy me were the neighborhood raccoons. One eve, the cat is all riled up, so I figured out something was in the trash. Went out with a broom to chase it off (being in city limits … ) and found the ass end of a large raccoon sticking out of trash bin. Gave it a whack and up pops a head to glare at me. Now raccoons look all cute on TV but they are actually unpleasant critters with sharp teeth and claws and the weight to back them up. Saw more than one coon hound get badly cut up by one in my younger days. So I give her another whack or three and she starts to leave. She? Yep, out of the bin come two more of her last litter. Each gets some broom whacks as lessons.

      Like

        1. Not that I know of, but a sick one showed up a year later in the front yard. Since it was in the afternoon – raccoons are nocturnal – I was worried it had distemper, local animal control was utterly useless, and since the neighbor’s daughter kept wanting to approach it – I dispatched it myself.

          Like

          2. I had a raccoon staggering around in the back yard last year. I had a company come out and shoot it (I’m in town and they are uptight about gunfire) and it tested negative for distemper and rabies: I figure it had been eating the fermenting wind-fall apples and was blitzed drunk.

            Like

      2. The Residential Rodent Recycler is a smoked Persian cat, black-grey and reddish with bright yellow eyes, called Rommel (by the TX family), “that cat,” or “el gato del Diablo” (after he almost blinded a Golden Retriever puppy up the block.) He has tags and a collar, but devours squirrels as if he’s starving.

        Like

        1. Had a pair of grey and whites when I was younger. Twenty kittens later they finally got spayed (“what, again? can they get pregnant when they already are?” we asked).

          The two always hunted in pairs. One, hissing and making a big noisy stink (distraction) the other stealthy as an owl swooping in for the kill. I think they killed or cowed every animal beneath their combined weight in at least a two block radius. The local dog pack, when they got loose, gave those two a wide berth. I’ve woken up to dead skunks, rabbits, vermin of nigh every stripe, snakes, birds, and I once even saw them trying to claim the corpse of a deer I hope was roadkill (and became dinner for the neighbors later on).

          Funniest thing was the local’s wild dog. They never played with him, trained him, or any such thing but fed him. I think animal control had to put that dog down eventually, which is a sin on those that should’ve taken care of him. Anyways, three adult female cats (the two and one daughter) would go next door to eat sometimes, just to show the dogs who is boss. behind them toddle fifteen, count ’em (and they did- these were smart cats) fifteen kittens.

          Wild dog is incensed by this latest insult. It’s *food*! And those things that look like food are gonna eat it! I gotta stop ’em! Bark bark bark!

          Spooky (elder statescat at this point) gives him one swat. He cowers. I swear, that dog just *looked* like he was going to act up and she swats him *again* this time claws out.

          No dog ever bothered those cats for more than a very brief instant. We actually kept blueberry bushes for a few years, and saved quite a bit on cat food with two *extremely* satisfied looking felines. I swear the expression was “and they never learn…”

          Like

  21. No lame excuse for me today. I walked a mile in the local humidity. It went smoothly enough that I might increase the distance.

    Like

    2. Awesome. I got my husband out of the house for a half-mile walk after dinner tonight. We were dripping with sweat from the humidity, but the temperature had dropped from broiling to just fine.

      He’s been putting in little bits of time, on breaks from the writing, on a recumbent exercise bike (did you even know they came in recumbent?). Next up: giving him his own penguin timer!

      Like

    3. Two miles, no words. The 0345 call did me in. I did watch half of this week’s course lectures, thought (Pitches and Blurbs). And did laundry.

      Like

  22. Here in VT it’s all gray squirrels unless you get up to our higher peaks where you might find a few reds. The grays have driven out the reds pretty much everywhere.

    Driving in Burlington it’s not at all odd to see a gray using the thick phone cables as above-ground pedestrian footways. We get our share of kamikaze squirrels but we’ve invested a bunch in squirrel-proofing (as much as that is possible) fixed installations, leaving the primary squirrel problem as “hey, I just became a 13.8kV conductor” when they bridge the wires. The really high-voltage stuff is separated farther than they can stretch.

    Like

  23. Ever since a couple of squirrels chased off the crows that were keeping my teen-aged self from getting enough sleep (well, as close to enough sleep as a 24 hour day can provide) I’ve had a fondness for squirrels.

    Though I’m not as fond of them as my mother thinks. Every year she gets me some kind of squirrel-themed gift, usually at Thanksgiving.

    Like

  25. Speaking of guinea pigs, aka cavy, I understand they’re very popular down in South America. In fact I believe they may be Peru’s national dish.

    Like

    1. WordPress is evil. Sometimes it lets me post under my old screen name and at other times forces me into this broken name I had to pick when I registered. Rest assured that Uncle Lar and uncle0lar are one and the same.

      Like

  27. About a quarter of the way through reading the comments, it occurred to me that this story about a motorcyclist encountering a squirrel ought to be mentioned:

    lifeisaroad.com/stories/2004/10/29/neighborhoodHazardorWhyTheCopsWontPatrolBriceStreet.html

    I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it’s nonetheless something that seems like a squirrel would do!

    I’m often amazed at what animals can do when they are determined to do something. I can’t think of any personal stories from the top of my head, though, even though I’ve had to deal with a bird in the house a couple of times, and had once found my sister’s turtle after it was lost for a couple of weeks or months…

    Like

Comments are closed.