War of the Squirrels - Finale
1/15/2021

Dear reader, remember last week?

I suspended our backyard birdfeeders on a rope hanging from a fifteen-foot branch in an attempt to thwart Mama-Kazi, the death-wish squirrel, but no. She scuttled down the rope with jagged little claws.

Another trip to the hardware store yielded a slim and slick plastic pipe that I cut to size to shroud the Manila rope. Wobbling at the top of my twenty-foot ladder and securing the last knot in the two dangling feeders, I giggled at my genius.



But the Mistress of Mayhem sauntered across the Sweetgum branch towards the tops of the newly installed pipe ropes and stopped to look me in the eye. She chattered a few squeaks. I hadn’t mastered squirrel-speak yet but I reckoned I had finally gotten her goat.

“See, it’s way too slippery and dangerous, now, isn’t it, girlie?”

Undaunted, way up in the sky there, she tip-toed across my fingers. She rolled over the side of the branch and then slid down the frigging pipe like she planned on landing on a Fire Engine. Thudding down on one of the feeders, she flagrantly gobbled up some sunflower seeds.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”



I scrambled down the ladder and jogged over to the storage shed to retrieve the conical baffles that I had purchased earlier. I carried them over to the dangling birdfeeders, climbed the ladder and secured them halfway up the pipe rope, about eight feet off the ground. I had to use stainless steel clamps but I didn’t care.

“Ha!”

I clap-wiped my hands in final victory but didn’t even get down the ladder before Mama-Kazi began her Fireman slide. She smacked down on one of the baffles, hammering out a gong so loud that it threatened to resurrect Buddha himself. A bounce and a grab and she was back to stuffing her face.

“Aiiiiyyyyie!”

To make matters worse, more Mad-Hatter-Hamsters began to follow her lead. It became a fuzz-head parade across the branch and down the pipes in a rude pong off the baffles onto the bird buffets. Slack-jawed, I stared at the growing army of rodents.

“That does it, I’m getting the spray!”

I marched the can of Pam out of the house and up the ladder and coated those white plastic pipes with the slickest grease this side of the Intracoastal. Did that stop them?

No.

They blurred down the pipes, getting to the birdseed at breakneck speeds. Every once in a while, though, one of them would pong off a baffle, willy-nilly, and crash into a sprawling heap of grass. Geez, I didn’t want to kill the little chew-tooths.

Alright, the hanging-from-the-trees approach was a bust so I cut the feeders down. I returned to a shepherd hook hanging assembly but another idea dawned… Double baffles, yes! I mounted two conical baffles, piggy-back style, below each feeder and carefully spaced the hooks and baffles to prevent Mama-Kazi from executing her Kungfu moves.

It worked!

She couldn’t get past the double baffles. I won… I had finally conquered Rodentia!

“Hee, hee, hee.”

A metallic chime caused me to glance back at the feeders.

"Oh… my… God… "

A freakish raccoon was bending the shepherd hook over and spilling the birdfeeders onto the ground.

“Okay, you guys, I give up. Everybody, go ahead… Eat the dagnab seed.”



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