My Grandmother lived in a home that had 3 HUGE Oak trees in the back yard in Columbus, Wisconsin. Those trees formed a cathedral of sorts towering over her home and the large back yard. They were magnificent. I have been told that my grandparents chose to build their retirement home there, on a lot across from the home where they raised their family, in part to save those trees from being cut down.
We spent hours and hours watching the gray squirrels and song birds that frequented the feeders on her deck overlooking that incredibly beautiful space. The song birds were all identified, adored and welcomed with specific food for their needs. The squirrels were not. They were greedy little rascals that provided some limited entertainment but ultimately were destructive. There were many iterations of bird feeders to prevent the squirrels from stealing all the food. When we shooed them away, they would stomp their feet, clearly curse at us and bite a chunk of wood off the railings. This was a decades long relationship...to the point where she finally had her rails covered in metal. She was in her mid to late 80s when I brought her a Super Soaker squirt gun. I can still remember the delight in her eyes when she realized she could load it, pump it up and aim it and shoot the squirrels from 20 feet away. One my very favorite memories of her is watching her stand in front of the door to her deck silhouetted by bright morning sun in her night gown and slippers with the loaded supersoaker at her side telling the squirrels they better look out, "I'm armed".
So, I am familiar with squirrels and their bad habits and the utter lack of long-term real solutions to the problems they present.
In my home, I love the morning light that comes into the guest bedroom. I hate the street lamp our neighbors put up over the alley that is now closed off. They are quite sure it prevents break-ins. I am skeptical but we pay our share of the bill and maintenance anyway. It makes for terrible light beaming in the back windows of our home. The sun never really sets.
To preserve the peaceful light in the guest bedroom and screen out the painful midnight sun, I planted Mammoth Sunflowers right in front of the window. Those are the ones that grow 15 feet or so, they provide a little bit of a screen for the evening light and don't shut out the wonderful morning light and won't add too much to the leaves and such in our gutters. I planted 15 or so of them. We lost several to our 87lb rabbit (Obie loved the small seedling leaves) and we ended up with 5 that grew big enough to provide the screen. Beautiful.
These two anecdotes comes together here. I said I am familiar with squirrels earlier. It turns out that our chickens have the same opinion I do about the squirrels. They have decided to protect our back yard for all manner of rodents including the chipmunks, red squirrels and the gray squirrels. The chipmunks and red squirrels simply avoid the confrontation. The grey squirrels, well, they have taken a different approach. After vacation, I discovered that our chickens were running all the rodents out of our back yard. Some unsuspecting gray squirrel would come into the yard and the chickens would descend on it. This lead to a great deal of squirrel cursing, stomping of feet etc. This escalated into a more general declaration of war.
The squirrels took to using our back entry way and sidewalk as their toilet and throwing nuts of all manner at the chickens.
One of the pathways exiting our back yard turned out to be our sunflowers growing up near the back of the house. The squirrels were using the sunflowers to get from our roof down to the garden. They would also use them as a quick exit when the chickens chased them out. And, I am sure, would stomp their feet and take a chunk out of a sunflower on the way out. They lopped the heads off 3 sunflowers. The chickens have taken to hanging out under the sunflowers to catch the squirrels. We have 1 tall sunflower and 1 much shorter sunflower remaining.
Public Note to Self...next year, plant more sunflowers and plant them farther away from the house so they do not become the squirrel highway.
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