Tuesday December 21, 2004

The Squirrel Campaign

I was not at all surprised by this item about squirrels, um, squirreling away light bulbs at the Cincinnati Zoo’s annual Festival of Lights. Why? Because I know from experience that the squirrels of the Ohio Valley are preternaturally resourceful.

My parents — and perhaps your parents, too — have spent a lot of time and materiel trying to control the squirrels around their home (which I will be visiting later this week.) This is what people do when they retire. They try to outsmart squirrels.

At my parents’ house, the primary object of the ongoing Squirrel Campaign is not keeping the little guys from stealing lightbulbs, but keeping them off the %&*#ing birdfeeder. This is, in fact, a national obsession among retirees, and there are even specialty products available, like the Yankee Flipper, which spins when touched, flinging squirrels in all directions. My parents have not yet gone this far. Here are some of the homemade solutions they have tried, which I provide as a springboard for future research:

• HEIGHT Initially, the squirrels mounted the birdfeeder from the ground, so it seemed sensible to simply jack the thing up a few feet. In addition to being able to unscrew lightbulbs, however, it turns out squirrels can jump very, very high.
• SMALL PIE PAN This solution involved taking a bakery-grade pie pan, drilling a hole in the middle, and bolting it to the bottom of the birdfeeder so that the squirrels had nothing to grab onto when approaching from the ground. This is when they started jumping to the feeder, not from the ground, but from the trunk of the tree.
• DISTANCE To keep that from happening, the feeder was moved way out on the end of a branch, so that the squirrels could not longer jump from the trunk of the tree. This is when they started shinnying down the chain that suspended the feeder from the branch.
• RUBBER TUBING To prevent access-via-shinnying, the chain was encased in plastic tubing. The squirrels seemed to enjoy that.
• LARGE PIE PAN Like the addition of the small pie pan, this mod involved drilling a hole in the middle of a pizza pan and suspending it on the chain between the branch and the feeder, forming a barrier/platform beyond which the squirrels could not shinny and off which they would often slide. I believe the large pie pan was regularly greased. They somehow made it to the feeder anyway.

Lately, my parents have taken to spiking the birdseed with crushed red pepper, which I guess squirrels don’t like, although I think they’ll eat it in a pinch.

In any case, after all this my parents and the squirrels now live in a state of mutual respect. The squirrels look down cautiously at the feeder from nearby rooftops — like Indians in old western movies — and occasionally leave large nuts by the back door, offerings to the dieties whom they apparently believe they have pleased by overcoming the many obstacles that have been placed in their paths.

I am looking forward to retirement, to the day when it is my time to fight the squirrels. I’ve got a few can’t-miss ideas and lots of time to work out the kinks.

Posted by jim at 11:09 AM ||