SQUIRREL WARS
The Isolation Blues;
reflections during covid-19
Our farmhouse is located just up the hill from the cabin and sits in the middle of three and a half acres of Norway spruce trees (picea abies) planted back in 1988 by the US Department of Agriculture Soil and Water Conservation. They are a fast growing tree noted for their distinctive hanging boughs that drape like someone has just hung out the backwoods laundry. After thirty years now they are 35 to 40 feet tall so we feel very much in the woods. They also bear prolific seed cones up to six inches in length, the largest cone of any spruce species. What Linda and I didn’t realize at the time is that we were selecting a house lot located in the middle of a perfect red squirrel habitat. It is red squirrel paradise! Some of the seed cones are larger than the squirrel carrying it. It’s quite a sight to see one of these little guys darting across the forest floor with a giant cone in its mouth. Sometimes I don’t know how they can see where they’re going without slamming into a tree? It’s also a bit risky walking through the woods when they’re gathering cones. When they pull off a seed cone they just let it drop to the ground (which is about 35 feet down) and they are indiscriminate in their aim. If you stop and listen while they are harvesting you can hear cones striking the ground all around you in the woods. Perhaps a hard hat is not a bad idea. And they are ambitious. They start gathering the seed cones by midsummer and they stash them just about anywhere (I cannot detect any strategic planning on their part.) One of their favorite storage spots is under my wood piles in the backyard. As I’m splitting firewood in late summer I uncover huge repositories of seed cones they’ve put away for winter. They never seem to figure out that this is not a good place to store cones and they give me a good chattering as I go about my “demolition work.”
So one day a couple of weeks ago I’m taking a break from splitting wood and I’m sitting in my coffee break chair when I notice little flakes of something falling out of the tree overhead. As I look up I spot a red squirrel sitting on a branch above me and he’s holding a six inch cone nibbling on it like an oversized ear of corn. I guess he’s on break too. The cones at this point are green and tightly wrapped, they haven’t dropped their seeds as of yet and are perfect eating like ripe corn. I don’t move or make a sound. I just sit there and watch him continue to eat the cone. He’s watching me. I’m watching him. Apparently this is one of his favorite spots because I notice a pile of cone cobs under the tree and cone flakes spread everywhere. When he finishes, he pauses for a moment and then tosses the eaten cone cob at my feet. He gives me another good chattering and then goes back to work. I picked up the cone cob and took a photo of it which you will see below. When my twin sister and I were kids and we had corn on the cob for dinner my Dad would look at our corn cobs after we had finished and he’d always say, “By the looks of those corn cobs it looks like someone has a couple of missing teeth…” Well, my Dad would be impressed with this squirrel.
Back to work.
In the Woods,
Dave
September 30, 2020
Watch out for those hungry squirrels, and always wear a hat! Love this blog.
Ha! I do have my hard hat…
We have mostly hemlocks and cedar here in our woods by the lake. A few years ago, we had almost all gray squirrels. More recently, the red squirrels have taken over. We only saw one gray this fall and only saw it once. But an addition to our kingdom this summer were a lot of chipmunks, maybe for the first time. Anyway, we put our feeders out a couple of weeks ago. We like feeding the chickadees, nuthatches, goldfinches, and occasional purple finch, the small birds. We think the blue jays are beautiful, but they are greedy, stuffing their craws with hundreds of black oil sunflower seeds before flying off to store them in their hidey-holes. We have taken to scaring them off by yelling, slingshooting wine corks, or using the soft-pellet pistol (the latter two types of ammunition are harmless, even with the rare direct hit). We also used those weapons on the red squirrels if they managed to get onto the big feeder itself. HOWEVER, in the last couple of weeks, one particular squirrel (we call him “Red”), has taken on the mantle of “Feeder-Protector.” He jumps the 6 feet from one hemlock to the feeder on the pole or climbs our new multi-hangar pole feeder and just sits there, scaring off the jays. Red’s presence does not seem to bother the small birds and he doesn’t try to scare them, but he jumps at the jays and does a very good job. So, we are letting him feed unmolested as a reward for his hard work. Cornell’s bird study folks had never heard of such a thing, but theorized that the jays may have stolen from Red’s seed stash and he is now in a sort of revenge mode.
Linda & I gave up on bird feeders years ago (with the exception of humming bird feeders) because we knew we were outgunned by the reds…