Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Me vs Squirrels

I observe from a place of concealment
as a squirrel unwittingly approaches the trap
The squirrels in our yard have gotten completely out of hand.  In years past, they ate ripe tomatoes.  This year they began eating the green ones.  Nancy and I have seen with our own eyes, a squirrel pluck a green tomato, sit on top of the tomato cage as he took one or two contemptuous chaws, and then throw the rest away.

We got not a single tomato this year.  Not one.  Thank you squirrels.

Now that all the green tomatoes are gone, the squirrels have gone after the suet cages we have hanging from the eaves.  The little bastards climb up on the roof and then onto the cages where they cling while nibbling suet.  Yesterday one of them knocked down and broke one of my hummingbird feeders.

I have spoken aloud a plan to get a daisy b-b gun and wait in ambush to plug squirrels.  A neighbor of ours used to do that, and I thought he was comic and eccentric, but now I'm starting to see his point.  "I really mean it," I'd say to Nancy, holding a mutilated green tomato, the latest victim of squirrel rapine.  "I'm going to get me a gun and kill me some squirrels."  (There's something about blood lust, even if it's just squirrels, that makes my grammar more colloquial.)  "Yes, dear," Nancy said patiently.  "Go do it."

She knew I was bluffing.

The reasons I would never fire on a squirrel are (A) I am a lousy shot.  (B) I don't have time to sit out during the day plugging squirrels. and (C) I have this weird Puritan ethic that tells me if I kill something that isn't actively attacking me, I have to skin it and eat it.  No thanks.  I don't object o squirrel meat per se, but the thought of me taking a bowie knife to a squirrel carcass and then presenting the remains to be fried up in a skillet is just too ridiculous.  So the squirrels are safe from gunfire, at least from me.

So I went to the hardware store and got a humane trap.  If the squirrel steps inside to taste the yummy birdseed I've left, two aluminum doors pop down, locking him in a little cage.  If I catch one, I will drive that rascal with me to work, Arabia Mountain High School, which is thirty miles distant and on the other side of not one, but two busy interstates.  Get home from that, sucker.

Arabia is on acres and acres of wooded land.  I have seen wild turkeys strutting there.  Deer are not uncommon.  There will be plenty of forage for the squirrel.  There are hawks and foxes also, animals not as squeamish about raw squirrel as I am, but that is nature's way.

I'll keep you posted.