In addition to the birds, we have lots of gray squirrels. They are cute little rodents that are very playful and mischievous. They would probably deny the mischievous part. They would tell you they simply do what rodents do. I can almost hear a squirrel saying: “If I don’t know what something is, I dig it up, climb it, or gnaw on it to see what it tastes like. By the way, you need a sturdier umbrella for your patio table. It looked strong enough when I jumped off the tree branch, but it almost collapsed when I landed on it. As you can see, it sags rather badly now. I love what you do with plant pots. The soft soil makes it easy to bury nuts there, and the pots help me remember where I buried the nuts. Of course, I frequently have to move the damn plants out of my way. You call it a telephone wire. I call it a tightrope. It also makes a great swing. The insulation on it has a terrific texture. I could not resist chewing it. It didn’t taste all that good. I probably won’t chew it up again, but you can bet that eventually another squirrel will find the texture as irresistible as I did.”
If you mention bird feeders in front of bird watchers who live in wooded areas, they will invariably bring up the subject of squirrels. People are always trying to come up with baffles to keep the squirrels out of the bird feeders. The squirrels, however, are incredibly persistent and clever. This makes it almost impossible to design a baffle that works for very long. We have stopped trying to foil the squirrels. Now we bribe them. It is not a perfect solution, but, like the casinos, we have stacked the odds in our favor. The squirrels usually content themselves with easy meals and ignore the feeders. Every once in a great while boredom or curiosity will cause a squirrel to climb a feeder and raid it, but what are you going to do? I do not want to kill them. They are a part of the ecosystem, and they are entertaining. They seem to take a special delight in meals they think they have stolen. This is particularly true if stealing the meal does not require them to exert themselves too much. Like anyone else, they would rather not burn a lot of calories to secure the sustenance that provides those calories. It is the thought that counts. If I leave a package of nuts out, a squirrel will always open it. It will do this with a look on its face that says: “Aren’t I the clever one. The earth belongs to the clever.” It’s a squirrel’s version of social Darwinism. “Let the clever survive.”
The one animal that is both beneficial to squirrels and their nemesis is the blue jay. It is beneficial because squirrels have learned enough blue jay to know when a jay is sounding the alarm about a predator. The squirrels will scurry up a tree when they hear the alarm. They will then add to the cacophony by thumping and barking. A blue jay is a nemesis because it will watch a squirrel burying nuts. When the squirrel walks away the blue jay will swoop down and start to dig up the nut. The squirrel will usually notice this in time to drive the bird off before it can get the nut. The squirrel will then try to rebury the nut in another location. The blue jay, however, will still be watching, and the process will be repeated. It is amazing how many times the process will be repeated before one of the animals finally gives up.
B.D. squirrels are tamer than A.D. squirrels. I guess I should define the abbreviations. B.D. is between dogs and A.D. is after we get another dog. We get our dogs at a rescue center. Since they are not puppies we find ourselves between dogs more often than we would like. Our current dog is a miniature Schnauzer. She is quite a departure from the standard Poodle that preceded her. Our Schnauzer is almost the same color as the gray squirrels, and she is only twice their size. She was obviously a city dog before we adopted her. Her initial reaction to the squirrels was curiosity. She wanted to know what those creatures were. She snuck up on a squirrel and tried to sniff its butt. After setting what has to be a record vertical jump the squirrel landed on the dog’s back. It is difficult to say which of the animals was more frightened. The squirrel went one direction and the dog went the opposite direction. I have to hand it to the dog. The next day she decided to test the squirrels by charging one of them. In spite of the fact that the dog did not bark, the squirrel saw her and darted up a tree. This makes squirrels one of the few animals that will run from her. Not that this is very important to our dog. She is getting too old to want to chase them very often. She does not bark at them either. She saves her barking for humans and other canines.
One of the things I have never understood about dogs is why they seem to find it so desirable to shit on paths. They do not do it all the time. They do it just often enough to force you to watch where you are walking. My brother has a theory about that. He said they are hoping you will step in it and track it all over the place. “That way they get the maximum amount of territory marked with a single load,” he said. Our Poodle was probably bright enough to think of that, but I doubt that she had the personality to do it. Our Schnauzer has the personality to do it, but I doubt that she is bright enough to think of it. Yet both dogs decorated the path, and current one still does it. We can only conjecture as to why. They would not tell us even if they could talk. They have their own survival instincts, and what makes perfect sense to a dog is not always easy for a human to grasp. They will do their best to please the leader of the pack and all of its members, but you still have to make some compromises. That is not such a bad thing. We love our little dog, and she returns our affection. It was not easy for her to trust all of us. She evidently had a difficult past, but she is now the cheerful, accepting dog we hoped she would be.
First published in macsbackporch.blogspot. com on Sep. 23, 2009
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