How on earth did it get up there! Again!

The first time, the morning after we got home, an all-black squirrel was on top of the suet cage I’d kept above Kim’s birdfeeder. In three years, no squirrel had ever reached either one no matter how enticing they had ever seemed: they had checked it out and decided it couldn’t be done and that was that.

But we went out of town, the bigger birdfeeder ran out, and the other must have still been loaded.

The first thing I noticed when we got home was that Kim’s beautiful stained-glass feeder was smashed on the ground. But that was the pretty one!

Years ago, Richard ran some insulated wiring through a hole he drilled at the top of the wall of his home office at the foot of the L of the patio.  A few hours after the first time I caught him, I looked up from the computer and somehow that same squirrel was swinging on those wires high above my nose on the other side of the glass, trying to find a new path to that suet cake and not sure how to make the leap from there–the angle of them was totally wrong. How he got there I can only make a wild guess.

Nothing but glass and height between us and it knew it was caught again. Only, this time it missed its intended halfway-down point and fell seven feet straight down to the concrete.

And that was that. Order was restored. I hoped.

I’d been missing my usual black-and-red squirrel but he had disappeared. And yet this morning, he was back in his usual post, in charge of all things patio like before as if he’d never left–and the all-black one with the gap in his tail was gone.

And then I went outside.

Oh.

Well maybe the others won’t copy his leaps after all, not after that. He got carried away with it. I know a talon-toed chef who clearly served squirrel for breakfast.