💥Back Yard Bullies: SCREAMING Squirrel vs. FURIOUS Jay!💥

Such drama in the back yard! I had to take down all the feeders after the back yard bear kept crashing the place, but finally relented, and when I put everything back up, we were soon overrun with wildlife. I was delighted to see a Steller's jay after a very long absence - you hear them before they see them, as they screech and screech, then flap down and bob around for seeds. While they're among my favorite birds, they aren't very bright and can't seem to navigate to get up to the feeders, though they flap around looking ungainly while they attempt to hook on somewhere. In this video I happened to be outside with the camera when a small war broke out. The jay was screeching, and a squirrel was snarling back at him. It went back and forth for  a while, and must have been a territorial thing because the jay finally flew over to the tree where the squirrel was hunching and flapping its tail and swearing in squirrel. It ended in a draw in which the jay took off, but soon reappeared when the squirrel frisked off to another tree.

MY BIG FAT GREY SQUIRREL!

Why is it grey squirrels are so much cuter than the blackies? The silver-grey fur, the white ring around the eyes, the FAT FAT lush silver tail, and their habit of looking right at you as you film them foraging. . . I can't stay mad at them, even as they drain all my bird feeders.

NASTY SWEARING SQUIRREL disrupts the neighborhood!

I have never been sure WHY squirrels do this, as it's never obvious what the threat is. I'd say it's territorial, but this isn't the time of year for defending babies. There is plenty of food in the yard from all our bird feeders, which they constantly drain. The babies were sort of weedy this year, and the adults don't look so good, smaller, with thin tails, and a lot of fur missing. The huge cedar tree in our back yard is a sort of high-rise apartment tower for birthing and raising their young, and we often see pregnant or nursing squirrels. 

Though the ubiquitous blacks aren't very cute this year, the greys with their sweet faces, white tummies and big, fat, puffy silver tails are much nicer-looking, but very rare. In fact, everywhere we've lived, greys are much more rare and look totally different, plumper and prettier.  But I have read in many places that the blacks turn INTO the greys. This makes no sense at all, as they are so physically different, and we do not ever see an interim stage as we do with mallards, where the males "fledge" over a period of months. 

These days the smaller red squirrels are even more rare. With those, you mainly hear a short, sharp bark that can go on forever. Only once I saw one on the back fence, flapping its  tail violently and swearing away, but sounding more like a distressed bird (which I thought it was, initially) than any kind of squirrel. These I very rarely see in the back yard, but when we go on our trail-walks they will approach us fairly timidly, hesitantly, as if hoping for food. 

Even as I write this, I hear yet more swearing in the back yard. What is going on here??

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🧡SWEET MAMA SQUIRREL (and - drama in the back yard!)

Squirrels are about all we get, these days. It's very depressing, and I don't know why it's happening. Everywhere we go, the bird count is nearly zero, at a time when the waters should be teeming with different species. The Blakeburn Lagoon is practically empty, when we used to see shovellers, ring-necks, wigeons, SWANS. . .and even a sandhill crane and an OTTER, to name only a few (red-tailed hawk?). Why have the birds abandoned so many places? Why is it happening everywhere? Only Burnaby Lake still has birds, but mostly geese, a few mallards, and hungry blackbirds. My darker senses tell me that Something is coming, maybe an earthquake, or something even worse, because birds have been known to have an acute spidey-sense for these things. I want them back! Birds are a huge part of my mental health, and helped me get through the worst of the pandemic - although they were already thinning out two years ago. With all the food I put out, I should be attracting them like a magnet, but all we see these days is fat squirrels and the odd finch at the window feeder. Will they EVER come back? Where are they? Why are they doing this?

Slugging Squirrels

The unbearable cuteness of squirrels

This squirrel needs Dr. Now

Fattest squirrel I have ever seen. They're never exactly thin, but in the fall they begin to fatten up for a winter that never really arrives. Oh, sometimes we get a dump or two of snow, but to call that "winter" in Canada is an insult. But it's hardwired into these creatures to squirrel away food, to gather it and leap around with it in their mouths for a while, to look industrious, then scrabble away in the dirt and bury it, almost immediately forgetting where it is, then digging up some other squirrel's plunder and eating it on the spot. They don't hibernate around here, any more than the geese migrate, so they just keep on eating all winter and getting fatter. I don't hear all the swearing and scolding now that I did in September-October, but I'm not sure what that means. (Most bizarre moment: hearing a sound kind of like a squirrel scolding, then turning around and realizing it was a Steller's jay imitating a squirrel). I also haven't heard that nasty little red squirrel for a while (click on bottom to watch it on YouTube):

This guy was just furious for a couple of months, though at first I was sure it was some territorial bird. The red squirrel appeared to own the clump of bushes in the corner of the yard, though once I saw THREE black squirrels in there, thumbing their little black noses at the red squirrel, who went absolutely insane. Squirrels do this on purpose, just to be annoying.

I hear a lot less chattering and squeaking and swearing now, but I see a whole lot more eating.

Death to the squirrels!

I don't know why squirrels hate each other so much. Their furious vocalizing is like the worst kind of vile, nasty profanity, and it goes on and on by the hour. In this case, three of them seemed to be fighting over the same piece of turf - a clump of bushes in the corner of the back yard that "belongs" to a little red squirrel, who is even more nasty and aggressive. Is this place a particularly good source of food, shelter - what? Or just desirable because all the other squirrels want it?

In this case, a squirrel finally left the scene, followed by another, but they quickly chased each other back into the bush and started it up again. Strangely enough, a bunch of robins had a big squabble in the same bush for no reason I could determine. 

At about the 2:30 mark, Bentley comes around to lighten the mood a little, though the squirrels never stop swearing. They swear themselves hoarse, and it seems to go on all afternoon. At the 4:00-ish mark, you can see a squirrel sitting paralyzed on the fence post, no doubt suffering from squirrel PTSD.

The thumbnail isn't a real picture, so you can relax. I photoshopped it out of two other pictures. I've never seen squirrels actually fight, though some have big scars and chunks of fur missing from their tatty coats. A few have almost no hair at all on their tails, giving them a ratlike appearance. But that may be more from narrowly escaping coyotes, cougars and other predators than from fighting each other.

Nazi Squirrel II

Trying to find a post on this blog after five years and 3762 posts (!? - merciful GOD) is like straining birdseed through a sieve. Or something. But I finally found this animation, which I made quite a while ago, and which now seems just a tad simplistic.

In looking back, which you should never do, I found a shocking number of posts which referred to squirrels. I don't know why that is, because I don't even LIKE squirrels particularly, and find them nasty, aggressive, and ugly to listen to with all their suburban cursing and swearing. 

Maybe that's why they make naturally good Nazis, as expressed in this, my second Squirrel Sieg Heil animation.

This is just the poisoned icing on the cake.

Giant rainbow squirrel

Mission Impossible Squirrel

SQUIRREL!

Drama in the back yard

(Please note. These gifs can run slow at first, or at least they do for me. Once they have gone through a full cycle, usually 10 or 15 seconds, they should run smoothly.) The first day I ever worked with the video camera, every bird in the neighborhood suddenly showed up - including some we had rarely seen before. This is a female flicker who has taken to the suet feeder. She hung around for quite a long time - oh, so beautiful, while I scrambled to capture video of her.  I hadn't put the camera on the tripod yet and was wobbling all over the place. I don't know when we'll see her again.

Up close and personal with a Steller's jay. These guys are frequent visitors and tend to gulp and guzzle the seeds, quickly emptying out the feeder. They are so beautiful, almost as mystical at the flickers.

We were amazed that the flicker hung around for so long. In this case, it flew down and pecked at the crack in the door. Flickers are a kind of woodpecker and would normally go after grubs in the ground. This time it actually used the feeder (very briefly), hammering away at it.

Squirrels! We have three baby squirrels living in the back yard. This happens every year. They were likely born in the spring and are SO CUTE that we can't bear to keep them away (like so many bird-feeding people try to). We couldn't believe they'd go after suet or be able to get to it. Obviously they can. Occasionally we get fat bushy-tailed grey squirrels, and even the odd red squirrel which is particularly adorable.

We have tons of juncos in the yard. This is an example of a particularly handsome male. They just hang around and eat, mostly the fallout from the feeder. They are easygoing and don't attack each other, believing there is plenty to go around.

And this is the miracle - even more miraculous than the appearance of the flicker. This is a spotted towhee, a bird we have only rarely seen, and always on the ground. Not sure why so many amazing birds showed up when I was using the video camera for the first time! 

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Drama in the back yard

Such drama in the back yard! Ever since I lost Jasper, my beloved lovebird, I've had a sort of bird-shaped hole in my life. I thought longingly of a bird feeder, but our house is constructed in such a way that it does not allow hanging anything that we can see.

One day I was in the garage and saw an old  Ikea lamp and thought: that's it! With some remodelling, it would work as a stand that could hold some sort of container that would drain water (so it wouldn't be flooded with Vancouver rainwater). I didn't think birds would object to wet seeds. After much experimentation and remodelling, we had a sort of jerry-rigged feeder in our back yard and were enjoying the visits of juncos and chickadees.

One day I heard a dreadful screech and saw a large prehistoric-looking winged creature darting and swooping overhead. After looking it up on the Cornell Ornithology site, I recognized the Steller's jay. I noticed at that point having to refill the food supply practically every day, then finally saw His
Birdness up there - such a magnificent creature, handsome, arrogant, a little wicked. But I still couldn't believe he was cleaning out the feeder so often. Then I looked outside one day and A SQUIRREL was climbing the pole of the lamp, shimmying up like some sort of demented pole-dancer. The squirrels had breached the unbreachable feeder. I sprayed the pole with Pam, and now they just endlessly climb in one spot, thinking they're making progress. Squirrels are resourceful but not too bright.

As a little kid, I snuffled out signs of nature wherever I could. Where I lived was decidedly urban, but things were different then, without the incessant din that seems to be part of modern life: the endless construction, the dust and smoke, the earsplitting racket that never stops. Right now as I sit here writing, there is a constant, steady drone of something like a very loud vacuum cleaner. (WHAT IS IT???). No one else ever mentions the noise, because like the frogs in boiling water, they have become so acclimatized to it that it no longer registers on them - or else they are now half-deaf.

The milk was delivered by horse and wagon. Cloppa, cloppa, cloppa. (This ended up in my first novel, Better than Life.) People find it hard to believe, but it was true. My friend and I walked to Tecumseh Park on our own when we were maybe eight or nine. While social critics railed on and on about the blinding pace of progress and how it was killing human beings, not to mention the gross and alarming "population explosion" that no one ever refers to any more, Chatham, Ontario plodded on. Now I see it as a magical place, with a flowering cherry tree in the back yard that I could climb to get into the neighbor's yard to look at their pigeon coop. This was lifted whole for Mallory, my second novel.

Birds were a favorite fascination. We never had a bird feeder, though there were plenty of places we could have put one. In the depths of winter, my mother would ask the butcher for suet - really, just the fat trimmings from steaks and chops - and throw it out onto the snow. She never watched to see if the birds got it, or if it was gulped down by some roaming dog. (Coyotes, raccoons and bears were never a problem then, as we had not yet stolen all their land and backed them against the wall, where they would be demonized for encroaching on OUR territory and causing us trouble.)

I wondered about the suet. The reason she gave was "in the winter, the birds need a lot of fat to help them keep warm." This didn't make sense until a long time later.

I would adopt baby birds that fell from the nest quite frequently, fully believing I was rescuing them. I had no idea then that many species of bird PUSH their fledgelings out of the nest before they are able to fly properly,  then swoop down on on them to feed them until they are ready to take off on their own. A strange system, given the ubiquitous cats that just roamed everywhere then (for to keep a cat inside, let alone spay or neuter it, was unthinkably cruel).

But I took them in anyway, enchanted. Most of them died, of course, because I really had no idea what to feed them. One pigeon made it, in fact he burst out of the box and started flying all over the porch where I had to keep these things. But he was close to flight anyway and only sickened by the pollution in the Thames River. (Some things never change.)

I was also quite taken with squirrels, and noted that another neighbor had tamed a baby squirrel which clung to his arm. I WOULD have a squirrel for myself. Since I was bullheaded, a requisite for living in an environment which was almost wholly devoid of love, I kept on the watch for one. Then I saw a grey baby on the cherry tree, with that stunned, frozen look squirrels have when panicked (have you ever seen one run back in front of a car when crossing the street?). I put my hand out, not just to touch him but to grab him, and got my reward. Had to get a tetanus shot. Heard that bitter, even savage squirrel chattering for some time after that, probably the parents swearing at me, and rightly so.

The other day, having thrown a handful of grapes out in the back yard (and yes, I know I'm not supposed to feed wildlife) I noticed a black squirrel sitting up spinning the grape around in its paws, eating and spitting flying pieces out, probably the skin. I decided to see how close I could get. Normally they scram when I open the back door. It was amazing - I came closer and closer, and he just stood there. I was close enough to touch him, but didn't - I had already broken several rules of back-yardness already, and could just hear the scolding I'd get from all those militant naturalists.

Of course he ran away after a few seconds. I wondered what happened. Frozen in panic? Greedy for more grapes? (He had lots already.) I wondered if this was my pole-dancing squirrel, or if all of them had tried it. I do notice the older squirrels look very scarred and beat-up, while this year's babies are still fluffy and sleek. The one grey squirrel who often visits has an impossibly fat, silver-grey tail that makes you want to believe in fur coats again. He flaps it around in that adorable, yet alarming way that squirrels have. Probably a warning to keep off.

This has awakened the little girl in me. Finding things on YouTube that I haven't heard in decades is a strange feeling. I'm reaching out for something. I will probably attain another lovebird, have put my name in with a breeder, but one never knows about bird temperament. I love my Steller's jay, the way he darts his head around, posturing like a proud show dog, and raises his pointed black crest. Well, we haven't destroyed everything quite yet. But I am secretly glad I will not be here in 50 years, or even 20.

I have been trying to recreate an album called Pastorales, long out of print, and  have found a few favorite tracks. This piece reminds me of the innocence and enchantment of my childhood "nature days".

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http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

All squirrelly

 

When you find a new way to make gifs, it's cause to celebrate. But what will our subject be? Rob Ford is just about crapped out.

This creature beating his knee with that strange pink cylindrical object looks even cooler with most of the color taken out. Gives it a sort of artsy look.

Can you read his furry little lips? What might he be saying, do you think?

Uhhhhhh. . . freaky.

Cable cars, squirrels and me

Angry squirrel on a roof

I don't know what these little buggers are so upset about. If I said these kinds of things in public, I might be locked up. Are they just territorial, or what? I'm just sayin'. I see them outside the window of my semi-new office, which faces out on green space. They take flying leaps, scurry up and down the cedars, and - we can't call it chattering or scolding. It's plain nasty, is what it is. The tail-flapping is definitely very macho. So do females do this too, in a display of machisma? Are they defending, what, the nut in their mouth(s), the nut buried under the tree, the tree itself? Or are they just nuts? Are they scaring away imaginary predators? Or just racketing off for the hell of it?

I'm just askin'.

A squirrel of one's own

From way back in the memory junk drawer, I recently retrieved an image (or a song, or whatever-it-was) of Martin Short playing the bizarre Jackie Rogers, Jr., a performer always on the verge of being buried by his own pretentiousness.

What sticks in my mind like a paper clip is a song he did: "Pardon me, miss, but I've never done this/With a real, live squirrel."

I remembered the original, smarmy song from the Mike
Douglas Show, one of those '60s things that sounds predatory and creepy now (a "real live girl?" As opposed to a blow-up doll?). It was like something playing in a bar on Mad Men. Well, OK then, what's the connection to me as I sit here over coffee (God, it's too strong, give me more) contemplating my "new" surroundings?

I've never had a real live office before. Never. The room I've worked in since I started writing with a computer in Year Zero isn't really an office, it's more of a utility room. There are cheap bookcases everywhere, crammed and cluttered with other people's stuff. My husband is a kind of controlled hoarder (controlled by me, I mean) who just sort of exudes or emits this stuff, little coils of wire, black plastic things, used twist ties, boxes that haven't been opened since 1972. He keeps instruction manuals for appliances that have long ago bit the dust. On top of that, one of his desks with an old obsolete computer on it was pushed against the wall, never used, just stored.

The stuff that was mine wasn't work-related: craft boxes full of felt and beads and feathers, and and and. The place had become a catch-all.

What happened was this: our usual screaming territorial battles escalated when he went into semi-retirement and spent even more time clumping back and forth between the main part of the house and the garage. This meant clumping right through my non-office, the only room with an access door, a door which had to be slammed heavily (or so he believed) every time he clumped on through.

It was getting bad, I mean, really bad. He just didn't see that there was a problem. Why was it disturbing me that he ran a power saw in the garage, when there was a whole wall between us? Why was it bothersome that he had blathering ad-infested talk radio on full-volume as he worked because he's deaf as a cucumber?

I just ground my teeth a lot and put up with it until he suggested something.

"You know the bird room."

"Yeah. The bird room."

"Upstairs."

"Yeah."

"I had this idea, but I don't think you're going to like it."

"Try me."

"What if we switched your office with the bird room? I mean, put the bird down here. This would be his bedroom. Then you'd have your own private room upstairs and I could do anything I wanted in the garage."

It was one of those idiot-simple solutions that no one had ever thought of before. Jasper is the most spoiled 3"-long bird in history, with a cage that takes up 1/4 of the room. Wouldn't he be happier downstairs where he could have his own bedroom and be part of things? Why was this so unthinkable?

When my long-grown-up kids found out about this, they looked almost offended. "Whaaaat? What are you going to do that for?"

Move something in the house? In the house?

"Sure. The bird needs a change."

This may have had something to do with the fact we're finally putting some money into the place and getting a new bathroom and new windows and stuff like that. I hate change, and my first reaction was unease, even dread, but I was absolutely gobsmacked when the change was made relatively smoothly and without mishap.

Instead of fuming and tripping all over and missing the stack of 750 padded mailers in the old place, I find I. . I. . .

I like it here.

I have a view, which I never did in the old place, unless you count a wall with a huge tacky bulletin board on it. It's all cedary, layers of feathery green which right now has a gentle drizzle sifting through. On nice days, if they ever come, I'll have sunlight. I can see birds flitting about. In 25 years here, I have never looked out this window. I never had this perspective, ever. It was wasted on a dumb bird.

The room kind of wraps around my desk (a huge desk which I love, and which was in storage for years before I realized I could be using it). These are my books in the bookcases, not frayed copies of Shell Busey's Home Ideas and How to Repair Practically Anything.

It's just. . . my stuff, my space. I feel both humbled and exalted. The energy is completely different, almost cocoon-like (when I feared it would be claustrophobic). My old amplifier from 1973 is gone, replaced by a sleek model that looks like it might have come from this century.

There are carpets, which softens the sound of everything. I like it.

I could go on and on about all that "room of one's own" stuff. And I wonder now if I'll be able to concentrate without all that clumping and slamming. Will I miss the hissing arguments, his posing as a bloody saint wronged by a heartless, selfish bitch? Well, we can still do that in Ikea when we can't agree on a lamp. (Snarling at each other in public is especially enjoyable.) And have a few Swedish meatballs with gravy in the cafeteria while we're at it.

The good fairy came (or maybe the sanity fairy), and now Pinocchio is a real boy. I never thought it would happen. And hey: what's that I see leaping from branch to branch in my stunning new view? Could it be. . . a real live squirrel?