My feeder began as a bird feeder but the squirrels came, and they are awfully fun to watch. The chickadees don't come much anymore since the squirrels took over but the blue jays compete very well with them. We also get cardinals, but not often, and a woodpecker will come when I have suet out, although he usually busies himself pecking on the adjacent tree.
I used to have a bird feeder with black oil sunflower seeds for the cardinals. It was up on a pole with aluminum flashing wrapped around so the squirrels couldn't climb up. One day a mourning dove showed up, and every time he came back he would bring more with him. Eventually there was a whole flock of mourning doves. They seemed to work as a team. The feeder was too small for more than one dove, so they designated one to land on the feeder and scratch all the sunflower seeds out with his feet and onto the ground. The rest of the doves would walk around under the feeder and pick up the seeds from the ground. The cardinals gave up and so did I. The doves could clean out the feeder in no time.
We have pigeons that act like your doves. It was okay when there was four of them but thirty of them will clean out the feeder in no time, and leave a big mess behind. Fortunately for the squirrels, pigeons are big wusses and one squirrel can drive off a flock of pigeons. My cat slaps the window when the pigeons are there, and that scares them off too.
We aren't supposed to put feeders out during the warm months as it attracts bears. We used to feed the birds all winter, but haven't in recent years. The squirrels we have a re the little Red Squirrels and they are real pests, especially if they can get into an attic or shed. We have a plywood "dumpster" that we use, and the buffers chewed through the plywood to get at the garbage inside.
I mentioned this in another post, but I will again. The squirrels frequently dig up bulbs that we plant and replant them elsewhere. Of course, we don't know about it until they pop up in our vegetable garden or elsewhere in the yard, where we leave them. I figure the squirrels are probably better landscapers than I am. Here's one that's been growing at the entrance to our driveway for a few years. It flowered three years ago, then the guy that our neighbor hired to mow his lawn mowed it down, as it is adjacent to their yard. Last year, it didn't flower, but this year it has flowered and has several other buds that are ready to go. It looks like some kind of a lily; actually like a daylily but the flower lasts for quite a well, so I expect it's some other kind of lily. A daylily isn't actually a lily, you know.
The worst threat we found to our garden in Missouri was not squirrels, they only invaded the insides of our walls and ceiling! When my wife found a bunch of vegetable plants uprooted one morning, we determined it was Ground Hogs! Woodchucks. They were huge, resembling rats. Size of a small dog. A fence won't stop them, they burrow under it. I really could see no valid reason for these beasts to be present, so got rid of them as they appeared. Next came the Opossums. They posed much less threat to the garden, but had the most fiercesome-looking curved teeth I could imagine! Caught one in a trap, by accident, was after the Ground Hogs, and when I approached the 'Possum viciously began biting the wire sides of the trap. I had no doubt that given the chance, those teeth would have sunk into my flesh!
Growing up, we tamed a fox, a couple of raccoons, and a skunk, but one animal that we were unable to even come close to taming was a woodchuck. It came to us as a baby. Probably, its mother had been killed in a trap, but I don't remember. Dad brought it home. We fed it with a bottle and tried to make friends with it, but the woodchuck was having none of that. From the very start, it would bite every chance it got but its bites were tolerable when it was a baby. As a juvenile or young adult, no one dared handle it without wearing rubber gloves, and even then it hurt. While the fox, the raccoons, and the skunk were free to go as soon as they were old enough to survive on their own, they all stuck around for quite some time after being given their freedom. The woodchuck just kept walking.
@Ken Anderson Yet, every groundhog day, the top-hatted jurisdictional in Punxatawny holds in his arms "Punxatawny (whatever they call him)", docile as though drugged....... Frank
This year, I planted mostly climbing beans rather than the bush beans that I planted last year. Although I had set up an old ladder and several strings for the beans to climb on, they got away from me. They grew fast, they were prolific, and they soon reached the top of everything that I had prepared for them. Next year, I'll be better prepared. We got a couple of good crops of beans this year. I just picked the second crop. The foliage was so thick it was hard to find all of the beans. Some of the ones that ripened a bit too much for eating, we're drying for seed next year. Plus we'll be going to the MOFGA Fair later this month, and they give away a bunch of prize-winning beans there. This summer's crop was from last year's MOFGA Fair, and they grew so much better than any of the ones that I have bought elsewhere. We have a few grape vines, but they haven't produced any grapes yet. One of them is three years old now, the other two are two years old. The older one is getting to be pretty tall, but still no grapes. The lingonberries are doing great. This wasn't a great year for berries overall, so I didn't get a lot of berries from them but the plants have certainly been filling out the space that I've made for them. I expanded the space either last year or the year before, I don't remember, but they've nearly filled it in. I tried planting corn, but they got started late, for one thing. For another, between the squirrels and Ella, my wife's cat (she's my wife's cat when she's destructive), most of them have been pulled up. I still have a few plants but they're small and I doubt we'll get anything from them. I don't know how many onions we might have below ground but most of the plants, above ground, have disappeared. I'll give them another week or so and go digging, to see what we have. I was too lazy to thin the carrots so I don't expect much there. Our front flower garden is doing pretty good. Most of our perennials survived the winter, and several of the ones we planted last fall came up too, although the squirrels relocated a few of them. Although we occasionally add an annual, we're looking for a perennial garden thick enough to hold its own against the weeds. I am also striving for perennials that flower at different times of the year so that we have flowers throughout the spring and summer. In pursuit of this, I even dug up a weed from the town's compost site a few years ago. I don't know what it is but it produces a lot of wild-looking flowers that last a long time so, for me, it's a plant and not a weed. I started with one, and there are several of them now. We planted twenty bulbs a week ago. I forget what they were now, but the squirrels dug most of them up. They'll probably pop up in places we're not expecting to see them. Meanwhile, I have replaced them and covered the planting site with compostable netting held down by compostable stakes, and that seems to have done the trick because the squirrels haven't dug them up yet. The netting is supposed to compost in a couple of years, but the stakes will last for four or five years. When I first built the rock garden in front, I covered the whole thing with compostable netting, but instead of staking it down, I covered it with peat moss. That's all fully composted now, however. We have a lot of squirrels this year. So far, they are often a pain in the butt, but in an amusing sort of way. Although I see a red squirrel every now and then, we have mostly gray squirrels. I'm up for the challenge.
@Ken Anderson Interesting about having a lot of squirrels this year. Can you actually "feel" or see a difference in numbers year to year? Our neighborhood in Chicago area had plenty of squirrels, they were brown-colored, but may have been Gray Squirrels. Our desert area here seems to abound with chipmunks, something I never imagined of the desert. They are quite clever with their front paws, using their tiny fingers to grasp food like raccoons do. The munks stand up on their hind legs quite often. They dig holes in our rocky ground, quite deep, and raise young underground. Fearless, they dart right into a bunch of quail eating seed, or hamburger buns we discard cut up, grabbing some and darting out of the foray again. The quail pay them scant attention! Frank
Yeah, since I watch them come to the feeder, on our second-floor fire escape, I have noticed more of them than usual. Since then, one of the newspapers also published a story about a larger than the usual number of squirrels this year. When I first put the feeder out, there were only the same three or four squirrels coming to it, and I could tell them apart, but now there are so many that I don't know which is which. Yeah, I wouldn't have thought there'd be chipmunks in the desert either. We have chipmunks here but I don't see them often. I've seen one at the feeder a couple of times, and Ella killed one a month or so ago.
Since our Landlord built the duplex across from us and also did some trimming on the oak trees we have not been seeing much of the squirrels that used to come to eat the peanuts my Honey would put out for them. Yet the Blue Jays love the peanuts too and there are more of them now than ever before...and they love to "fuss" at my Honey if he waits too long to put peanuts out for them. I miss the squirrels and I miss the big lot being empty and in its natural state which was such a good habitat for the squirrels, birds, and everything else. That's life though and at least the changes didn't care all our wildlife off.
Blue Jays and squirrels are common rivals. They live in the same area and eat the same foods. Both here, where I feed them, and up north where I watch them with camera video, I see the rivalry between the two. The blue jay will dive at the squirrel and drive it away temporarily, then the squirrel will lunge at the blue jay, neither one harming the other.
This is very true Ken and my Honey and I have often enjoyed the playful rivalry between the Squirrels and Blue Jays, and also among the Hummingbirds playing "King of the Mountain" on our feeder. Progress has stopped the squirrels from coming but maybe in time they will get used to the changes and come back. The Blue Jays seem to just ignore the progress going on around us and as long as their peanuts are put out for them...they continue to play and eat right where they always have.