Our Birds And Squirrel

I have really come to enjoy the squirrels, and particularly in the winter, when my feeder draws more of them around. Before Christmas, the grocery store stocks various kinds of nuts in shells because, I guess, cracking nuts is a Christmas tradition. Although I don't know why, Christmas was when we had nuts still in a shell while I was growing up too.

Anyhow, immediately after Christmas, the ones that are left are 50% off so I buy as many of them as my wife will let me buy, which usually involves making a trip to the store by myself. When they run out, at least a couple of times a month, I buy nuts for them.

Most of them, they simply haul away and I will find them buried in my garden, my outdoor planters, beneath leaves, and even in my compost pile. Gray squirrels are inefficient hoarders so they don't even remember where they put the stuff, most of which is covered by snow and ice when they need it the most.

But once they have hauled away their quota for the day, they will sit on the railing and eat them. It's fun watching how quickly they chew, and that their jaws appear to be on autopilot. Of course, having the squirrels there gives the cats something to do too, as they like watching the squirrels as well.

I especially like placing some nuts on the windowsill so that the squirrel will come all the way up to the window to get it. That drives Ella mad, that the squirrel would have the audacity to come right up to her while she's slapping at the window.

The squirrels know about the window, and will come right up to it, and would be touching noses with Ella if not for the window pane, and all the while Ella is doing her best to intimidate them, rapidly scratching on the window or slapping it with her paws.

When they are not on sale though, nuts can be expensive. I have found places online that sell raw nuts or nuts intended for squirrels, which are probably a lower quality nut. Although the prices are good, their shipping charges are generally so high that it's cheaper to buy nuts made for people to eat on Amazon. I recently abandoned a shopping cart that had $40-some of nuts, and they wanted more than $20 for shipping. As a marketing gimmick, I'd probably be more likely to pay $60 for the nuts than to know that I'm paying half as much for shipping as for what I'm buying.

Here are some nuts that I will never buy again.



Since we don't have any black walnut trees here, I thought my squirrels might enjoy something new, and these nuts were intended specifically for squirrels. I bought them on Amazon.com, and they were Prime shipping.

However, while the squirrels eagerly carried a bunch of them away, we hit a snag when it came to eating them. First, I noticed a black walnut sitting on the railing that looked whole. Looker closer, I could see that it had a few scrapes on the shell but had not been opened. I thought maybe a squirrel had been startled, and jumped to the tree, leaving the nut behind. However, later there were four whole nuts on the railing.

Then, I watched a squirrel dump the rest of the black walnuts out of the bowl as if they were in the way. I tried opening one with our nutcracker, and couldn't do it. I hit it on a brick with a hammer and it took a few hard whacks before it crumbled. It didn't crack open like walnuts usually do because it required a hard hit in order to impact it. There was almost no meat inside of it.

The picture is from the Amazon ad. The one that I opened had almost no meat inside and there was no way that I could crack it. As far as I am aware, no squirrel has ever been able to open one.

They were almost entirely shell, and the shell was so hard that the squirrels couldn't get through it, so they finally gave up.

I have recently bought some people-grade mixed nuts and filberts that they like well enough, but they are not cheap. Fortunately, I mostly buy them unsalted peanuts and other types of squirrel food that isn't so expensive.

 

Although squirrels supposedly have two litters of young each year, I only see young squirrels at our feeder about once every three years. Mom does not clear the way for her young ones to eat. While I assume she feeds them while they are still in the nest, once they are out, they are on their own. The adults will repeatedly chase the young ones away from the feeder, while they try to sneak up from another direction. Usually, they young ones come later in the day, after the adults have eaten and hauled away their quota.

 

Maybe I could have, but I ordered black walnuts and received black walnuts, although not the kind I would ever order again.

Blue jays and squirrels are natural competitors. They generally live in the same environment and compete for the same foods. We get blue jay here too. The jays will fly down at the squirrels, trying to chase them away from the bowl, and the squirrels will jump at the jays to get them out of the way. The blue jays are fast though; they can fly down and grab a peanut before the squirrel even notices them.

 

I just watched a squirrel take an empty half of a walnut shell and use it as a bowl, filling it with sunflower seeds, corn and other smaller pieces of squirrel food, then carrying it up on the railing to eat it where it can look over the yard.

 

Since our really cold days, I have seen only one gray squirrel, whereas we used to have as many as eight of them coming to our feeder. I don't know if they didn't survive the cold or if they've found a better place to eat. Now that we don't have so many gray squirrels, we have a couple of the much smaller red squirrels, and we're getting more birds back to the feeder. Some of them I can't identify but we have at least four woodpeckers, who were there at the same time, and a lot of chickadees. Oddly, I'm seeing only one blue jay, and they were previously as plentiful as the gray squirrels. Even on the coldest of days, the little red squirrels were feeding, and they come around late in the afternoon too, whereas the gray squirrels seem to call it a day long before dark.