When Critters Attack

Our bird feeders were under siege this weekend from both a roving band of grackles and a determined squirrel.

The grackles managed to empty an entire bird feeder in just a few hours. They dispatched two envoys whose job it was to throw the seed down to the rest of the mob on the ground. Jay and I spent much of Saturday yelling at them to go away.

Grackles are a member of the corvid family. This group of birds also contains magpies, blue jays, and ravens. One of their dominant characteristics is their intelligence which gives them a remarkable memory when it comes to remembering where to find food.

We have some allies against the grackles, their cousins the blue jays. I like to refer to them as the Blue Jay Mafia. They agree to help with the annoying grackle population and we look the other way when they themselves wreak havoc at the bird feeders. Of course blue jays have the distinct advantage of being prettier than their cousins and also not quite as intelligent since they themselves haven't figured out how to gorge themselves on our freely offered seed.

So now we're faced with the choice. As the marginally more intelligent species how do we choose to act when all the cute birds are scared away by the annoying ugly ones who consume too much food at too quick a pace?

Do we resort to violence and start shooting BB's at them, do we sacrifice our reputation as sane and normal people by continuing to yell at them from the window, or do we try to outsmart them?

So far we're going with the outsmarting option. We are recalling our gazebo feeder and replacing it with a tube style feeder which, according to birding experts, is inaccessible to large birds.

Hopefully this ploy will work until the grackles migrate further South. I fear for our sanity if they are here to stay.

The "outsmart" strategy is a dangerous one -- not for the critters but for my own self-esteem -- because how do you cope when they outsmart you?

And here enters our other backyard nemesis -- the squirrel.



When we first put the feeders out several squirrels made investigations into them. Mostly they found that they were simply too far away from the branches for them to reach. This weekend we realized that one female squirrel had solved this dilemma.




She had learned to pull the seed bell up by it's rope. Saturday, she was able to dump the remaining seed off onto the ground.



When she realized her booty was too heavy to escape into the trees she proceeded to cheekily gorge herself on the remains in plain view of our window.

Our "outsmart campaign" involved replacing the string with a wire coat hanger. We assumed that the wire would be too stiff for the squirrel to manipulate.

The stiffness of the wire now allows the squirrel to put more of her weight onto it. She doesn't need to haul the seed up because the wire now makes it possible for her to stretch all the way to the seed. (I know it doesn't seem possible but when you deal with squirrels you start to believe the unbelievable.)

Tomorrow, we plan to make the wire longer.