Every winter, we put up a bird feeder. It sits on top of a pole that in the summer has our little “mole chaser” windmill on top. The idea is that the wind causes the metal windmill blades to spin and rattle the pole. The local pocket gophers are supposed to become so annoyed by the vibration in the ground that they go away. The mole chaser only sort of works, but the windmill part looks cute.
In the winter, while the bears are still asleep, we take the mole chaser off the top of the pole and replace it with a bird feeder. We’ve seen mountain chickadees, Stellar’s jays, juncos, thrushes, and Canadian jays enjoying the bounty.
Unfortunately, we also have an extremely hungry squirrel who has figured out how to climb the pole and throw all the less desirable bird seed on the ground in his quest for sunflower seeds. Apparently, the birds don’t like the soggy birdseed on the ground as much as the dry stuff in the feeder, so basically Mister Squirrel makes a huge mess and the birds are grumpy.
Mister Squirrel is pretty sly, and although I suspected he was the one causing the mess, I wasn’t positive. Realistically, the birds couldn’t possibly eat an entire feederful of food in a day, so I figured something was afoot. Although I didn’t see him do it, I suspected Mister Squirrel was climbing the pole, since there’s no other obvious way to get up to the feeder. I got an old, particularly stinky bottle of Jergen’s hand cream and dumped some of the stuff on the pole to make it slimy.
Now we have a squirrel with the softest paws in North Idaho. One day, I did have the satisfaction of seeing him launch himself onto the pole, only to slide back down. The concept worked for a while, but the problem is that we’re in the typical spring freeze-thaw cycle, so when the Jergen’s froze onto the pole, apparently the pole was climbable again. Bye bye bird seed.
I decided to put an upside-down plastic peanut butter container under the feeder in an effort to block Mister Squirrel. After installing it, I went upstairs to observe. I saw Mister Squirrel sitting happily on the rim of the feeder heaving seed to the ground. Oops. Clearly, I needed something larger.
This week, I bought the wrong brand of soy yogurt, which was so bad as to be virtually inedible. (Note to vegetarians: WholeSoy is the only soy yogurt that tastes good and isn’t the color of old gym socks.) In any case, I threw away the nasty non-WholeSoy soy yogurt and used the container as the new improved squirrel blockade.
The good news is that the yogurt container seems to have worked and the birds have seed in the feeder. The bad news is that Mister Squirrel is expressing his anger by eating the yogurt container. Hmm.