Acrobatic Pests

It’s January and cabin fever is a perfect adage for what ails me. Lack of sunshine and daylight is very depressing to me., I try to keep up my regular walking routine but dressing properly is something that escapes me. I am either sweating my ass off or freezing. This of course takes all the enjoyment out of gadding about.
I thus spend more time in the house dressed up like Nanook of the north as I try to keep Unitil’s utility meters from emulating pinwheels.
This also ushers in my yearly conflict with the bushy tailed rodents know as squirrels. I have battled with these little acrobatic pests at my bird feeders for many years. How anyone could prefer Rocky J. Squirrel over the loveable Bugs Bunny is beyond me. This year I decided that I was getting a little to old to going running around my backyard like a deranged Elmer Fudd, chasing the elusive Rocky away from my feeders. My plan was simple I would create a squirrel feeding station away from the bird feeding station and every one would be happy.
How wrong I was. Not only did it create a much bigger dilemma it also proved to my way of thinking that yes, Bugs is intelligent and Rocky is stupid. Or as Bugs would say Rocky is a real maroon!
I hung the squirrel food on the rail fence that the two backyard squirrels use as their super highway. This being the normal route they use to make plundering raids on my bird feeding stations. For almost a week they blew right past the cornucopia of squirrel delicacies that I had provided for them. Little did I know that these greedy little buggers where so afraid that one of the poor little Chickadee’s might get a seed that they were ignorant of anything else happening in their domain. So I had to more or less stick their noses into their own feeding station. I slathered a mixture of peanut butter and sunflower seeds on the rail right above their catered feast. That day as they sped along the rail and stepped into the peanut butter it dawned on the morons that there was something there that could dine on with out have to hang by their tail at a contorted angle trying to pilfer a tiny seed.
As an avid backyard gardener and lover of the woods there is only two things that I could have done over the years that was stupider than setting out a squirrel feeding station. One would be planting invasive bamboo in a flower bed and the other was a having a wrestling match with a lady friend in a patch of poison ivy. And looking back that would be a stretch because the squirrel feeding station was a much worst disaster. Now it seems as though every gray squirrel with in a thirty mile radius has heard that the buffoon at 39 Norman road is this year’s patsy and has moved into my back yard. And of course that means they can not all be at the squirrel feeder at once. So my bird feeders are really under siege
My friend Bugs must be shaking his head in amazement or disgust at this years patsy!
I should not omit another humbling winter experience. My son-in-law Patrick completely kicked all the other Lemp’s asses in the annual college football pool. Let’s just hope this modestly shy and humble lad does not need to go out and purchase new hats because of it.
At my age I should not be wishing the time to fly by, but the way this winter is progressing the next seventy six days look like an eternity.