This morning my husband told me a story from his childhood. He talked about how, when he was a kid, he lived in a place that didn’t have a lot of green spaces for the neighborhood kids to play and so they played stuff like rugby and football (soccer if you’re American) in the streets between homes, and in peoples’ driveways. He said there was an old lady across the way who didn’t like them doing this and would stick her head out the door or window yelling something like “take that ball away” repeatedly in an effort to try and get the kids to clear off. Then he said, “when you yell at the squirrels on the bird feeders, that’s what it makes me think of”. Like, literally his whole point of telling me about this formative memory of his childhood was to draw a comparison between that crotchety old lady…and me.

And I suppose he’s not entirely wrong.

You might remember last winter, when I was complaining about how the grey squirrels would launch themselves off the railing or the snowbank, trying to get up to the small bird feeder I had suction-cupped to my actual window, and how hearing them bodily hit the exterior wall over and over again was driving both me and the dog kind of bat-shit. Back at the start of THIS winter, determined to be a problem solver as always, I got two bird feeders and hung them up across from my office window. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to see the birds as up-close as with the window feeder, but at least I wouldn’t be listening to the dog scream-bark about the squirrels thudding and scrabbling against the wall all day every day.

I set the feeders up once the danger of bears had pretty much passed, and immediately had a flock of juncos (the birds, not the pants…you have to be of a certain age to get that reference) visit. The chickadees came shortly after, as well as the sparrows. Everything was pretty copacetic for a while. Then one day, I noticed a red squirrel at one of the feeders. It seemed very polite, sitting nicely on the edge of the feeder eating one seed at a time and dropping the empty hulls down on the ground while it quietly took in the scenery. I have no beef with that type of behavior and so I let it snack in peace. We went a couple more weeks with no issues, but the calm was clearly too good to last…

…because then came the grey squirrels.

Grey squirrels are cute, but they’re absolute birdseed hoovers. And worse, they’re destructive. They’re smart enough to know that if they can’t get at the bird feeder directly, then bringing it down is their next most direct route to stuffing their faces. Within two days of the grey squirrels showing up, I went out to find the roof of one of my feeders pulled apart – the squirrels had been hanging upside down from the edge of it to get at the seeds because they couldn’t fit their fat asses onto the perches at the sides, and had ended up pulling the roof halves right off the nails of the piece holding them together.

I fixed the roof and decided the squirrels no longer got a free pass going forward. I might not be able to keep them out of the feeders entirely, but I could at least make them have to work harder for their ill-gotten gains, and be really fucking annoying to them in the process.

I have this crow call I bought a couple years ago, thinking that I’d bring crows to the yard with it and finally get to live the Crazy Bird Hag In The Woods With Pet Crows life of my dreams. As it happens, that didn’t pan out because crow calls are actually quite difficult to master. If you don’t have the right technique, the thing basically just ends up sounding like you’re blowing through a glorified kazoo…but it’s a loud, sharp sound that is very startling if you’re not expecting it, so I started using it to scare the squirrels off.

Again, I will give credit where it’s due: grey squirrels are smart. The first maybe 20 times I blew the crow call at them, they dove for cover and would stay away for a few hours at a time. Eventually they got used to it, though. Not so used to it that they completely ignored it, but used enough to it that they’d just retreat to a nearby tree branch and sit there staring over at me like, “Bitch, please. The second you move away from the window, we’re going right back to that feeder”. Which they did. Repeatedly. I switched it up on them and started either banging on the window or opening the window and hissing or yelling at them when I caught them on the feeders and again, that worked for a few days, but now they just hop off a little ways and wait for me to go back to my desk. My next plan is to try Slinkies on the shepherd’s crook that the feeders hang off of, but that will have to wait another couple days because said Slinkies haven’t arrived yet.

I’m fairly sure it’s all for naught at this point, as the feeders are close enough to the propane tank that I believe the squirrels could just jump from the top of the tank on to the feeders if they wanted to, and the ground is frozen with a bunch of snow on the ground at this point so I can’t easily move them until spring. But I have to keep trying, just out of principle.

Plus, you know, at least I’m yelling at rodents and not actual kids, so I’m not QUITE as bad as that old lady my husband (rather un-generously, I feel) compared me to. In theory. I’m sticking with that.