By Sharon Cohoon, Sunset senior garden writer
The gray squirrel, says George H. Harrison, author of Squirrel Wars: Backyard Wildlife Battles & How to Win Them, is public enemy number one when it comes to America's backyards. It is, he says, the number one suspect in half of all unsolved fires, the acknowledged perpretrator in most nonweather-related power failures, the wire chomper responsible for twice bringing stock trades on the NASDAQ to a halt, and responsible for creating its own industry, the $4-million-a-year business in squirrel-proof bird feeders.
The cute little creature requires a lot of ingenuity to foil because he is persistent, intelligent, and skillful. As this war story from Harrison's book illustrates.
"At the Schlitz Audubon Center in Milwaukee, a bird-seed study was to be conducted to determine the food preferences of the different species of birds in the area. A dozen bird feeders were strung on a wire, each filled with a different kind of seed. The study was immediately jeopardized by a horde of local gray squirrels that gobbled up the experimental seed before the birds could get to it. . ..
The Audubon researchers tried to foil the squirredls by stringing beads, coffee cans, and plastic milk bottles at both ends of the wire to keep the squirrels off the feeders. That failing, they set up large plastic walls at both ends of the wire. But the squirrels soon learned to leap over the plastic walls, land on the rolling coffee cans, and do their balancing act all the way to the feeders. The birdseed experiment was abandoned."
Can you top this story? If you can, I'll send you my copy of Squirrel Wars, which I ordered after a visitor to the Sunset Celebration Question & Answer booth recommended the book. (It also covers rabbits, deer, skunk, chipmunks, bully birds like crows and starlings, and other wildlife challenges.) Funny some years it's rabbits most complained about at the booth, often it is gophers, but this year, for some reason, squirrels were the troublemakers we heard the most complaints about.
