Watch Your Back

They started out as an entertaining diversion while we ate dinner. We could see them frolicking under the bird feeder and jumping from a tree to the feeder pole. Alex named one of them Bananas and we installed a special feeder. Slowly their numbers began to increase and they grew to the size of Paris's Tinkerbell.





I am talking about the squirrels in our backyard. They are grey squirrels, your standard New England variety. They are huge and they LOVE birdseed. We have started calling them the "Backyard Mafia". They have forced us into buying a squirrel proof bird feeder. It took them all of a week to find a way to bypass the locking perch. They actually brought in a specialist. We call him Sammy the Nut. He looks like a cross between a squirrel and a chipmunk (Don't even get me started on the Las Vegas that they probably are running under our yard!!!). He is light enough that he doesn't trip the perch and his job is to get on the feeder and furiously shovel bird seed to the big boys waiting below so they don't even have to get off of the ground. They have gotten to the point where they don't even need The Nut anymore because they have figured out how to open the locked top of the feeder and just climb inside for an all-you-can-stuff-in-your-cheeks extravaganza.



I thought it would be hysterically funny to buy a squirrel bungee (brand name Squngee) just to torment them.




It is basically a huge block of corn and seed that hangs from a wire attached to a spring (which is covered with fabric, we may want to cause extreme motion sickness, and maybe a concussion when they fall off, but don't want to pinch their little toes in the spring.). I don't think that they appreciate my sense of humor. David installed the Squngee on Saturday and when we got up on Sunday morning, half of the strings that hold up my hammock had been chewed through. They finished it off this afternoon while we were at the movies.

I just I hope we don't pull into the drive to this sometime soon.

(I will try to catch them in action sometime so you can marvel at their size and intelligence. We are trying to think of more mafia names for them. To this point they have all been called Bananas, but that just seems to tame now that we know their true character.)