I have a few things I could get worked up about, but I’m going to calm this one out. Someone tossed a rock through the driver’s side window on my car last night. It was parked at the commuter rail station. Nothing was taken. The local constables were predictably uninterested and useless. I don’t know what I pay $4 a day for, but it definitely isn’t a safe parking area. I only wish the emo freak that did it used a smaller rock. I guess they weren’t very strong because they had to use a cantaloupe sized bolder to get the task done. It dinged up the inside of the car more than I would have liked. I have given thought to cruising town today looking for teenagers to waterboard, but I will pass. Unrelated to broken glass, there is an article in the NYtimes today about the ‘everybody gets a trophy’ generation. Seems someone turned down a ‘dead end’ job paying $40g a year because he thinks he deserves the corner office. This is particularly irritable to me since I have a couple of unnamed and inadvertant connection to this child. I had a dead end insurance job once, it paid $26g a year. I worked nights at a grocery store for bender money. There were bills and loans and all sorts of good stuff to take care of. Eventually I made some connections (friends) and got some jobs that were a little better than the dead end insurance job. After reading about this dingdong’s plight, I have resolved to integrate this into job interview questions I ask. From now on, I am going to inquire about the nitty gritty jobs people leave off the resume and the dead end work they fought through. I work with some people who did some crappy work back in the day and they are by far the best people I have worked with. Anyone who sniffs of ‘deserving it’ is going to get an hour of verbal waterboarding and then a swift gtfo. But I’m not worried about that nonsense. It doesn’t affect me one bit. What I am interested in these days is Sciurus carolinensis, the eastern gray tree squirrel. Gray tree squirrels are able to jump a distance of ten times body length, rotate their ankles 180 degrees, and learn by observation through eyes that see as well peripherally as straight ahead. One of 278 species of squirrel, they outcompete inferior red and black squirrels everywhere they travel to. Why am I thinking about squirrels? Because these days, they give me great mental exercise. You see, M and I have a bird feeder. We’ve had one since we moved out to the woods here. Initially it was a $5 cheapo model, and this lasted a few years. We had a lot of birds. So many that we had to close the windows on weekend mornings because the sounds were too loud for extended sleep. There were chipmunks who scouted the feeder occasionally. I tried eradicating them and their holes with the infamous ‘chipper dipper’. Eventually I realized the rodents would keep coming like the red army at Stalingrad, so I took the dipper out of circulation. The old feeder eventually fell apart so we got another cheapo one this year. By mid april, it was already destroyed, covered in gnaw marks. Whatever was eating the seed also felt the need to eat the feeder itself. Maybe it was the fruit and nut blend that attracted the chipmunks, but it looked good to me so we bought it. In hindsight putting granola in a bird feeder is kind of silly, since it’s basically animal food, but I fell for the marketing. Now that the feeder was destroyed, we escalated. This time it was a metal feeder. It had a cage protecting the feeding posts. It weighed a ton. And food disappeared from it like there was a hole in the bottom. After a few days of this, I saw what was happening to the food. Chipmunks were jumping into the feeder and sitting in the seed tray and leisurely gorging themselves. I could chase them all day, but eventually they stopped being scared and practically did it in front of me. I rigged some extensions to make the feeder farther away from the chipmunk launching point. No luck. They are better jumpers than I realized. We were still getting birds, but they were mostly big jays that weren’t afraid of the chipmunks. None of the smaller colorful birds would go anywhere near the chippers. Several attempts at sealing off the fence into an unclimbable obstruction were useless, especially since I can only control our side of the fence and the neighbor’s side it still eminently climbable. When it came time for new bird seed, I moved over to the high stakes table. Since we were buying the expensive stuff, we needed better security. I remembered some tactics that we used back in L-town – namely smooth plastic obstacles that rendered highly evolved climbing claws useless. I decided on either sheet metal or lexan to cover the fence. M found some plastic ceiling light covers, like those seen in dentist offices all over the world. Perfect and at a fraction of the cost. Expensive seed and plastic sheet in hand we were ready to check out when something caught our eye – an item called a ‘squirrel log’. It’s a cylinder of compressed corn dust that you attach to something via a large screw. I figured I could give them an alternative, maybe broker a peace of sorts. I affixed squirrel log and plastic, loaded up the feeder and sat back to watch. Initially, it was a huge success. I saw the first chipmunk investigate the log. He took a sniff, then a nibble, then attacked with incisors blazing. The cylinder immediately took a bullet shape as more and more corn was removed. I gave it 3 days, tops, before I would need to reload. Eventually he got tired (or full) and moved on. It wasn’t until a few days later when I noticed I had a bigger problem than a little brown chipmunk. It hadn’t occurred to me that squirrels might be behind the attacks. Actually it had, but I just hadn’t seen any. I figured the woods were filled with easy food or better feeders, so why come after ours? This was a terrible miscalculation. While the feeder was far enough away from the fence to make it unobtainable by jumping, the pole the feeder was attached to was unguarded. I observed my enemy closely. It was a young squirrel, not very thick or furry. He would try climbing the fence, notice the obstruction, try to climb the plastic, fail, and then attempt a different route. This worked for a while until he realized he could climb an unprotected section of fence and simply walk across the top to get to the feeder. I planned for this and had erected a plastic bucket on top the feeder, open side up. This achieves two things. One, it is plastic and therefore unclimbable. Second, it is unstable and squirrels do not like climbing on things that feel like they are going to fall over. I howled with delight watching the young fella try and scale the bucket, only to tumble to the ground. I left for work, confident that I had won. It was only when M picked me up at the train that I learned my victory was temporary and the feeder was once again vulnerable. Undeterred, I took up an observation post and learned that he was using his miracle ankles and Olympian abdominal muscles to do some sort of inverted behind the back sit-up move while hanging off a thin metal pole. Since I cannot perform this maneuver, it hadn’t occurred to me that Mr. carolinensis would be able to, but I should have known better. Years ago, back in L-town, I saw some of the best of the breed in action. These were huge, tough monsters. For almost an entire summer I watched my parents apply years of accumulated engineering and renovating experience to the problem, only to find feeders ransacked day after day. I saw squirrel blood on sharp metal in the pursuit of seed. Endlessly flinging themselves off of shutters, trees, other squirrels, anything to get a single claw grip on a feeder to pull themselves up. More recently I observed a feeder that was affixed to glass by suction cups. Theoretically a squirrel cannot climb glass. But that knowledge did not deter the individual I saw. He figured that climbing a house and throwing himself against the glass was only one step closer to the seed and nut motherlode. A few years back there were accounts of a squirrel and tomato conflict down in the Philadelphia area. Reports came in of elaborate defenses and tenacious attacks, terrible interrogations and great atrocities, but the squirrels are never deterred, never discouraged. So today, sitting at home, waiting for the car glass man to call me back, I sit and observe again. I set my desk so I have a prime view of the battlefield. Early in the day there were several successful raids. After chasing them off I watched how the breached the defenses and have erected more. For the last hour the battle has been quiet. Perhaps they are seeking easier quarry, perhaps it is too hot for such games. (edit – I just caught him doing the sit-up thing again.. I missed the attack, but the new defenses are apparently useless... dammit) FYI - here’s the setup (the sock thing is another feeder the squirrels have no interest in):
“Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.”
