“Old Dude-isms”
I’ve reached a new epoch in my life, trying to prevent squirrels from eating the bird seed. This used to be a serious challenge for my dad. I don’t want to relate the incredible lengths he went to devise various “foils” for his adversaries, but I will say on a couple occasions my mom would say “Clarence get out there and take that down! Why that might hurt one of our great grand babies!” And reluctantly he would go remove whatever ingenious rig he had assembled to thwart the local squirrel community. Somewhere I have a picture of my mom staring at my dad, who is staring out the kitchen window pondering the battlefield.
I haven’t fallen that deeply into the crevasse but I certainly appreciate the depth. We have a tube feeder handing from the soffit of our sunroom. I pull the seed feeders down at the end of April and put them back up in November. I normally get to about the end of December before the squirrels figure out they can come across the roof and dangle off of the drip edge then lower themselves down to a smorgasbord of seeds, conveniently dispense through these nice size holes in a plastic tube.
Due to my convalescence, I’ve been spending a lot of time in a recliner in the sunroom, being driven crazy by squirrels, lowering themselves down to the feeder to chow down on our birdseed. It probably wouldn’t bother me if they ate a little bit and left, but they park themselves there and will eat nonstop for five minutes if you don’t interrupt them. so I came up with a very simple notion that I would put a monofilament loop connecting the birdfeeder to the middle hook in the facia board of the soffit. I made the assumption that the squirrels would not be able to grip the mono filament and I would have a preventative barrier between the seeds and squirrels.
It worked for 26 hours.
The big debate is this a challenge or should I walk away? I don’t know.
What I do know is I have to be careful or I will slip over the edge of a continuous slide into old dude-isms. I’m already a wreck about constantly wearing sweatpants and a down sweater.