Our Birds And Squirrel

Discussion in 'Pets & Critters' started by Babs Hunt, Feb 21, 2016.

  1. Von Jones

    Von Jones Supreme Member
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    Even though I don't like squirrels I have found myself enjoying their playfulness as I sit at my PC. It's amazing the agility they have. I know they don't like to get wet either I saw one sitting on a branch with the tail covering it's head. Funny.
     
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  2. Chrissy Cross

    Chrissy Cross Supreme Member
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    I always liked squirrels and still am not afraid of them as I am of rats but don't want them in my attic.

    They too can chew through wire like a rat and cause a fire and that was my biggest fear besides a rat chewing a hole in a wall and getting in the house....all the scenarios in my head played out badly.

    How would I get it out of the house...what if Pickles caught it? YIkes! That was the worst image in my head.
     
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  3. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    I have really come to enjoy the squirrels, and particularly in the winter, when my feeder draws more of them around. Before Christmas, the grocery store stocks various kinds of nuts in shells because, I guess, cracking nuts is a Christmas tradition. Although I don't know why, Christmas was when we had nuts still in a shell while I was growing up too.

    Anyhow, immediately after Christmas, the ones that are left are 50% off so I buy as many of them as my wife will let me buy, which usually involves making a trip to the store by myself. When they run out, at least a couple of times a month, I buy nuts for them.

    Most of them, they simply haul away and I will find them buried in my garden, my outdoor planters, beneath leaves, and even in my compost pile. Gray squirrels are inefficient hoarders so they don't even remember where they put the stuff, most of which is covered by snow and ice when they need it the most.

    But once they have hauled away their quota for the day, they will sit on the railing and eat them. It's fun watching how quickly they chew, and that their jaws appear to be on autopilot. Of course, having the squirrels there gives the cats something to do too, as they like watching the squirrels as well.

    I especially like placing some nuts on the windowsill so that the squirrel will come all the way up to the window to get it. That drives Ella mad, that the squirrel would have the audacity to come right up to her while she's slapping at the window.

    The squirrels know about the window, and will come right up to it, and would be touching noses with Ella if not for the window pane, and all the while Ella is doing her best to intimidate them, rapidly scratching on the window or slapping it with her paws.

    When they are not on sale though, nuts can be expensive. I have found places online that sell raw nuts or nuts intended for squirrels, which are probably a lower quality nut. Although the prices are good, their shipping charges are generally so high that it's cheaper to buy nuts made for people to eat on Amazon. I recently abandoned a shopping cart that had $40-some of nuts, and they wanted more than $20 for shipping. As a marketing gimmick, I'd probably be more likely to pay $60 for the nuts than to know that I'm paying half as much for shipping as for what I'm buying.

    Here are some nuts that I will never buy again.

    black-walnuts.jpg

    Since we don't have any black walnut trees here, I thought my squirrels might enjoy something new, and these nuts were intended specifically for squirrels. I bought them on Amazon.com, and they were Prime shipping.

    However, while the squirrels eagerly carried a bunch of them away, we hit a snag when it came to eating them. First, I noticed a black walnut sitting on the railing that looked whole. Looker closer, I could see that it had a few scrapes on the shell but had not been opened. I thought maybe a squirrel had been startled, and jumped to the tree, leaving the nut behind. However, later there were four whole nuts on the railing.

    Then, I watched a squirrel dump the rest of the black walnuts out of the bowl as if they were in the way. I tried opening one with our nutcracker, and couldn't do it. I hit it on a brick with a hammer and it took a few hard whacks before it crumbled. It didn't crack open like walnuts usually do because it required a hard hit in order to impact it. There was almost no meat inside of it.

    The picture is from the Amazon ad. The one that I opened had almost no meat inside and there was no way that I could crack it. As far as I am aware, no squirrel has ever been able to open one.

    They were almost entirely shell, and the shell was so hard that the squirrels couldn't get through it, so they finally gave up.

    I have recently bought some people-grade mixed nuts and filberts that they like well enough, but they are not cheap. Fortunately, I mostly buy them unsalted peanuts and other types of squirrel food that isn't so expensive.

    mixed-nuts.jpg filberts.jpg
     
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    Last edited: Feb 6, 2018
  4. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    Although squirrels supposedly have two litters of young each year, I only see young squirrels at our feeder about once every three years. Mom does not clear the way for her young ones to eat. While I assume she feeds them while they are still in the nest, once they are out, they are on their own. The adults will repeatedly chase the young ones away from the feeder, while they try to sneak up from another direction. Usually, they young ones come later in the day, after the adults have eaten and hauled away their quota.
     
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  5. Babs Hunt

    Babs Hunt Supreme Member
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    @Ken Anderson Did you get your money back from Amazon? :) Sounds like you and the squirrels really had a time with those nuts.

    We haven't been seeing much of the squirrels since they started building the Unit across from us but our birds still come all the time. The squirrels pretty much stopped trying to eat from the bird feeders once we bought peanuts in the shell for them. Now though, the Blue Jays like to eat the peanuts too so it has gotten pretty noisy out there when they don't want to share them. :)
     
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  6. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    Maybe I could have, but I ordered black walnuts and received black walnuts, although not the kind I would ever order again.

    Blue jays and squirrels are natural competitors. They generally live in the same environment and compete for the same foods. We get blue jay here too. The jays will fly down at the squirrels, trying to chase them away from the bowl, and the squirrels will jump at the jays to get them out of the way. The blue jays are fast though; they can fly down and grab a peanut before the squirrel even notices them.
     
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  7. Babs Hunt

    Babs Hunt Supreme Member
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    But if those walnuts were intended for the squirrels and the squirrels couldn't eat them than you should be able to get your money back. :)
     
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  8. Shirley Martin

    Shirley Martin Supreme Member
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    He is an indigo bunting. Pretty!
     
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  9. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    I just watched a squirrel take an empty half of a walnut shell and use it as a bowl, filling it with sunflower seeds, corn and other smaller pieces of squirrel food, then carrying it up on the railing to eat it where it can look over the yard.
     
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  10. Patsy Faye

    Patsy Faye Supreme Member
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    Clever little squirrels - no such thing as 'Mission Impossible' for them :cool:
     
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  11. Babs Hunt

    Babs Hunt Supreme Member
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    IMG_0042.JPG IMG_0044.JPG IMG_0046.JPG
    We have a new baby Dove at our Feeder now. I thought he or she was going to walk right up to our porch and say "Hi" to us yesterday. :)
     
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  12. Shirley Martin

    Shirley Martin Supreme Member
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    It is so pretty! We don't have that kind of dove here.

    I have been seeing four baby squirrels underneath my oak tree recently. Then there were three. Now there are none. When I went to the door to turn my carport lights on a few nights ago, there was a big hawk perched on the back fender of my car. My barn swallows are building nests under the carport and I thought he was looking a free meal of them. Now I wonder if he has eaten the baby squirrels.
     
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  13. Babs Hunt

    Babs Hunt Supreme Member
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    There's certainly a good possibility that Hawk ate the baby squirrels @Shirley Martin. :( We have a lot of hawks flying around here too...but the birds, etc. seem to be aware of most of them and "hide" when those hawks get to close. We also used to have a problem with some stray cats trying to eat the birds...but my Honey would watch out for them and shoot them with a water gun when they came to close to our feeders, etc. and now they stay away from our area.
     
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  14. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    Since our really cold days, I have seen only one gray squirrel, whereas we used to have as many as eight of them coming to our feeder. I don't know if they didn't survive the cold or if they've found a better place to eat. Now that we don't have so many gray squirrels, we have a couple of the much smaller red squirrels, and we're getting more birds back to the feeder. Some of them I can't identify but we have at least four woodpeckers, who were there at the same time, and a lot of chickadees. Oddly, I'm seeing only one blue jay, and they were previously as plentiful as the gray squirrels. Even on the coldest of days, the little red squirrels were feeding, and they come around late in the afternoon too, whereas the gray squirrels seem to call it a day long before dark.
     
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  15. Mary Robi

    Mary Robi Veteran Member
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    I had a problem with squirrels living in an area between the soffits and my eaves, since there was an opening. I wanted to seal off the opening but wanted to make sure all the squirrels were out first.

    So, I blew mothballs up into the area because I had been told that squirrels hate the smell of mothballs. Yes, it appears that they do. When I came home from work the next night, my yard was riddled with mothballs where they had thrown them out. Rude little buggers. So I blew them back in again. They threw them back out. We kept that up for a while until they finally gave up the fight and relocated. I sealed the opening and that was the end of my rodent houseguests.
     
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