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.

PEW PEW PEW

It took me a long time to figure out what that "pew-pew-pew!" noise was in the back yard. I heard it nearly every night, and it would get faster and faster until it turned into a sort of hysterical whistling and shrieking. I always assumed it was a particularly irritating sort of bird, but I could never see what it was.

I know what it is now. It's a squirrel.

This is a particularly aggressive red squirrel who loves to chase off any birds who try to get at "his" food source, the two bird feeders, plus any fallout on the ground. He also "owns" the very desirable real estate in the corner of the yard, a clump of bushes and trees which he often has to defend against those evil warlords of suburban wildlife, the Black Squirrels. 

This squirrel gets so worked up, I fear for its mental health at times. Maybe that's where the expression "squirrely" comes from.