Turning tail on it

Yesterday a small scruffy-tailed gray squirrel started eyeing my birdfeeder with a determination he’d not shown before.  So did a black squirrel, but it quickly decided the thing was not in range and not worth the effort.

That gray one, though, started stalking it. It approached it from every possible angle for hours, amusing me just on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling glass, including climbing the man-eating plant with the prickly trunk that in 22 years I have never, ever seen a squirrel on before.  But it was eight feet away and far too low. Forget that one.

It tried going down from the awning. No go.  It climbed the ladder to the left: that was the right height and straight across, but it was a good ten or twelve feet away.  Hmm. It laid there on the ladder, lifting its head every now and then, judging the distance, willing the birdseed to move closer by the power of its little mind.  The feeder stayed obstinately put.

I glanced over: the thing had climbed the near pole, four feet away, took a flying leap right through the twiggy branch I’d hung that was nowhere near strong enough to support it, and had lucked out and landed on the feeder, which went swinging wildly. The squirrel had a panic attack.  I was coming with the camera.  The dang seed wouldn’t come out! Frantic frantic panic panic GIMME THE FOOD! as I approached, trying at the last second to pull the top off with its teeth.

I reached for the door handle for a better shot and it was just too much. There was no way it could jump back to that pole.  Caught.  A surge of adrenalin and it managed to leap up from the top via that string it hadn’t found a way down from earlier, up onto the awning, and away.

It never came back.  Neither did the black squirrel.

Round one to the feeder.

(As I knit away on Dianne’s Caribbean colorway seacell/silk from Creatively Dyed Yarns… Gotta throw in a little knitting content occasionally or I hear about it.)