War of the Squirrels - Part 2
1/7/2021

If you remember, dear reader, that last week we met Mama-Kazi, a death-wish squirrel who declared war on our birdfeeder and me.

We left off when she leapt off our roof in a belly-flop onto our hanging birdfeeder with a deafening Ker-Thunk, swinging like a deranged pendulum, seed and shocked peanuts spewing the yard.

Cindy and I gaped at each other, incredulous.

“That squirrel is going to get hurt!”

By herself or by us became the question of the year.



Determined not to be outsmarted by a fluffy-tailed pipsqueak, I searched for squirrel proof birdfeeders but found nothing suitable to defeat our daredevil. I settled on a conical baffle that encircled the vertical part of the shepherd’s hook below the birdfeeder. I relocated the contraption away from the house so she could neither reach it with suicide leaps from the roof nor shimmy-ups from the ground.

I was delighted with myself.
“There, that takes care of that.”

The next day we discovered the little monsters had munched the plastic baffle to smithereens, flinging its debris across our lawn like fallen snowflakes.

“Dang.”



I raced to the local hardware store and purchased a STEEL baffle.

“Eat this, you little she-devil!”

She tried but couldn’t so it seemed like we would all live happily ever after.

By this time, an assortment of pretty birds had beaked-up to our feeder, including cardinals, chickadees, blue jays, doves and even the occasional woodpecker. There were so many squabbling birds that we opted to hang two more feeders from a separate shepherd’s hook, a double. Naturally, I purchased another metal baffle to thwart Mama-Kazi and her madcap cronies.

Cindy and I rocked in the Adirondacks out on the lanai with our evening drinks when Mama-Kazi peeked up from the underbrush by the Sweetgum tree. Like a gray submarine periscope, she cruised towards the birdfeeder setup. She emerged from the bushes and paused under the feeders, blinking black beady eyes and wringing black bitsy hands. We could almost hear her thinking.

As it turned out, I had mounted the two shepherd hooks too close together.

She hopped onto one of the shepherd’s hooks, clambered up and then jumped across to the other hook above its baffle. With a clang, she bounded off the baffle back to the first shepherd’s hook above its baffle. From there it was an easy climb up into the feeder where she manically stuffed sunflower seeds into her gray-haired face.

“Okay, Ricochet-Gray, enough is enough.”

From that point onward, I could not find a place in the backyard to locate the feeders where Mama-Kazi's minions couldn’t reach them. Too close to the shed, too near the tree, too handy the lattice, too tight the roof, the ghastly rats could launch off anything.

“How about I hang them from the Sweetgum tree with really long ropes?”

“That might work.”

Suspending the birdfeeders from a fifteen-foot limb without breaking my neck became an engineering feat but I managed, utilizing Manila rope and Boy Scout knots. Afterwards, I felt bedazzled by my superior intellect to that of a squirrel. There was absolutely no way she could get into our birdfeeders now!

But then I looked up and spotted Mama-Kazi sprawled across one of them, munching away.

“How’d she do that?”

To be continued…



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