GRAY SQUIRREL IN THE BIRDFEEDER

chickadee pecking a sunflower seed

It's a cool, damp day, raindrops dripping from leaves, fog whiting out the distance, nice white backdrop to foreground. A chickadee standing on a rhododendron branch pecking open a sunflower seed, eating the treat inside. I think of unwrapping a Hershey's "Kisses" with the dexterity of a critter with hands. The chickadee uses what we call feet for hands. A chipmunk has walked out to the limp extremity of the branch looking for a place to get a foothold to leap from. Couldn't find a firm part of the branch close enough to jump to the birdfeeder from. Brings to mind an old-timey word that has left the vocabulary, scutter. It was something of a generic term like critter. A dog could be called an old scutter, or somebody could be called a scutter. It's one of the words with its meaning in the sound. I doubt the word had a concrete definition. Looked it up just now in an online dictionary. It's the noun form of the verb to scurry. I think of a chipmunk scurrying over the ground foraging for leftover sunflower seeds. It's then natural to think of a chipmunk as a scutter. Even this definition leaves the meaning indefinite, something like a slang word, particular to context.

out front door looking left

 

The two windows with a birdfeeder in each one make better viewing than tv or movies. I sit here writing, looking out one of the windows for the next sentence, snowbirds and towhees hopping on the bare ground beneath the rhododendron. I also throw a big cup of sunflower seeds up high to rain down through the leaves to the shaded ground below. It sprinkles them fairly evenly in the shade where the birds and scutters feel safe. A gray squirrel is nibbling in one of the feeders. I don't mind. It's for them too. They don't take everything, though I do have eight squirrels now and at least that many chipmunks. I throw a fair amount over the ground too. It's for anybody that finds it. Possums come out after sunset and scrounge for leftovers with their noses that look like trunks snorting the seeds. Possum goes all the way back to dinosaur times. I theorize that possum has continued by not being very particular about what it eats, and by not being a fighter. A possum passes out from fright when attacked, farts a scent of death, pursuer backs away freaked out. Possum comes to, pursuer is long gone, possum goes about its way.

out front door looking right

Last night late driving on Glade Valley Road in rain and intermittent fog I came upon a possum in the middle of the road eating something that had died on the centerline. I slowed when I saw possum's eyes look up. I slowed further ready to stop, because possums are bad to get run over. My feeling is what's fatal for them is that it takes a moment for their pea brain to figure out that those two lights are a car going fast--lookout-lookout-lookout---so I like to give them time needed to figure it out, a second chance so when a pickup comes along driven by a consciousness that will turn the steering wheel to hit a possum, the possum might think a little faster about getting off the road. I can't save all the possums. The one last night turned and ran to the other side of the road instead of running across in front of my lights. I don't like it when one runs under a tire out of nowhere. Those get written off as consequences of the modern world. It's not my fault we need cars to get around in and roads to go fast on. We're victims together of the harsh edges of the modern world indifferent to consciousness.

happy gray squirrel

I believe what it is that makes the scene in the window more interesting than movies or tv is the feeling in myself. I feel love in my heart for the birds and the scutters. I'm happy hawks can't get them here. I'm happy to buy bags of sunflower seeds for them. The seeds are good nutrition, the oil good for their joints, their feathers, fur and much else, about like olive oil for us. They live in a world of humanity hostile to wildness while loving the idea of it. When a hawk catches one of my babies out in the open, the hawk gets a good meal. The hawks are part of my feeding stations too, part of the cycle. Maybe cardinal will come back a bluejay for a new color experience. Maybe chipmunk will return squirrel for the arboreal experience. I think it's their hands that make squirrels pesky. They use their hands the same as a raccoon. I like that my neighbors come to my house for dinner. I feel like everything that lives around me in the woods, in the meadows, in the ground, are my neighbors, same as human neighbors. This is a way of loving my neighbors, a seed kitchen for the feral. Caterpillar sits in the open doorway and watches. A bird, chipmunk or squirrel approaches her strike zone, she squeaks and her whiskers twitch. She doesn't eat them anymore. She knows them well like hunters know their prey, though in this time of her life she's an observer.  

caterpillar bird watcher

 

 

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A PEACEABLE KINGDOM

gray squirrel

Feeling good today, sun is out, a little wind, temperature 60, a nice spring day, birds singing. Feeling good on the inside such that it's not swayed by what is outside. If it were rainy and cold, I'd still be feeling good. When it's cold, I like to take a nap this time of day. The fresh leaves, the birds passing through on their way north for the summer, the air outside the windows visible in the small oak leaves wiggling, and behind them the rhododendron branches moving up and down, leaves in motion reflecting evening sunlight in sparkles of white light dancing on the green. A bluejay stands on one of the branches pecking at a sunflower seed to open it for the meat inside. Some of the chickadees and snowbirds have stopped flying away when I open the door. A few of the chickadees will stand on a branch in the rhododendron just a few feet away to watch me put seeds in the feeder. They greet me with their clicking sound. The squirrels don't run far when I go outside anymore. They used to fly up a tree like the giant that lives in the shack was going to puff up like Godzilla and snatch them with dragon teeth, swallow them in one gulp. By now they see the giant is about feeding them. They hop to a nearby tree and hide from me on the other side of the trunk, or go to a branch not too high and watch the giant serve their daily seeds.

Two kinds of squirrels dine here, gray and red. The reds are pine squirrels that live in the white pines around the house, this area their territory. A gray is close to the window foraging through the pine needles on the ground, staying behind greenery aware the giant is inside the window. It keeps an eye on me from time to time to see if I'm still in place. The giant watches the squirrel with the same thrill upper-middle class Americans get on a camera safari in the Serengeti to see lions and rhinos, leopards, herds of antelope from a cage on wheels driven by a local man armed with stopping power. I don't care that my squirrels and birds are not exotic. They are living beings same as the exotic varieties. They are the untamed people in my world. Watching a squirrel play chase with its friend, I am watching the spirit of life in squirrel form, not far from a monkey form. They have hands they hold things with, all four feet are hands. They have claws to help them climb. I've seen squirrels leap from one tree to another, jumping from almost a twig at the extremity of one tree and sail through the air straight up like standing, all four feet forward and open to grab the small limb at the extremity of the next tree. I've seen them run through the canopy in the forest from tree to tree as freely as on the ground, better. The ground has leaves and sticks, rocks, logs. Up there in the trees a squirrel can get around pretty good.

 

In my adult life I have focused a great deal of attention on seeing the consciousness in the non-speaking animal world where I live. I learned first hand from living with dogs and cats, finding that I can know the "person" there, the consciousness, the mind. They have all the mind we have except for the forebrain activities where the capacity for reason is located. The four-leggeds are only one leap in consciousness from my consciousness. In the time of taking care of my neighbor and friend in the time of leaving the body, I discovered when his mind went away (dementia), I could communicate with him same as before, but without words, like I do at home with my four-legged friends minus forebrain. Their inner peace tells me the forebrain is as much a curse as a blessing. I watch the squirrel through the window knowing if I had raised it from a baby, bottle-feeding it, we would be able to communicate. We'd be friends. The squirrel would probably be surprised at how illiterate I am to the way squirrels communicate and what they have on their minds. The same consciousness as in a cat or a dog. It could be fun understanding squirrel nature like I understand cat and dog nature.

A dove the same color as the ground is bobbing around in the shadow of the rhododendron, wary of being seen. If I were to open the door the dove would fly straight up making its vibrato squeak that sounds like a rusty hinge vibrating. A dove is a good catch for a hawk, making them extra cautious. All the birds are wary unto instantaneous flight response to the unexpected. The cardinal, too, seems wary as the dove. He makes an easy hawk target. They have a hard time hiding. This feeding station has such a network of branches around that hawks are disoriented when they fly into the feeding zone. All the birds scatter, leaving the hawk to sit on the roof peak of the birdfeeder and assess this webbing of limbs easy to fly through, but all maneuvering attention is focused on missing the limbs. Leaves filling out on the limbs will make a canopy over the feeding station hawks will not be able to see into. Red squirrels have a life span of one year, I presume because they are hawk targets. I have four red squirrels now. It tells me they're safe here. The new pair look a little bit smaller than the others, making me suspect the pair that live here have multiplied. Baby chipmunks (ground squirrels their old-time name) scurry about in the shade under the rhododendron, looking for food and playing chase at the same time. I like having my peaceable kingdom where everybody is safe from hawks. The two gray squirrels have become four. A chickadee carried a sunflower seed to a rhododendron branch, held it with a foot, pecked and pecked at the shell, ate the treat inside and flew in a straight line back to the feeder.

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A SAFE ZONE FOR BIRDS



            red squirrel

This evening's film, Jane's Journey, put me in a somewhat pensive mood. Wanting to get to some painting, wanting to open the laptop and write to you, needing to get up and refill the cup with Kenyan coffee and put a bowl of dry catfood outside the door for the possum. Possum comes by after dark for leavings. Initially, I put Caterpillar's unfinished "wet" food of the day outside next day for Martha the dog or Posie the possum, whichever found it first. If Martha didn't drop by during the day, Posie found it after dark. A gravel parking place across the road I shower with sunflower seeds in the mornings for the crows and whoever else wants them. By the end of the day the seeds are all consumed; at night Posie goes about eating the shells the birds discarded for the seed inside. A pair of red squirrels, also known as pine squirrels, live in a white pine close to the house. They run the ridge of the roof to a pine limb, then another pine limb, down the pine to the ground by one of the birdfeeders. I throw sunflower seeds on the ground for the squirrels so they won't have to raid the birdfeeder. At first, I wanted them squirrel proof, but found if I feed the squirrels too, they don't raid the birdfeeders. Originally, the birdfeeders were closed up by a plexiglas storage bin for seeds that the coon, whose territory includes my space, would break into at night, throw the roof off and get the leftover seeds.

Seeing there was no way I could keep the coon away except by trapping it, not an option, I decided to forget about the feeders holding several days of seeds, dismantled the seed bin and left an open space with the tray at the bottom to put two kinds of sunflower seeds in every morning, enough for the birds and the squirrels to consume in one day. Every morning the 2 birdfeeders are empty and I don't have to latch the lids anymore. I put hooks at both ends of the roof to keep hard wind, coons and squirrels from throwing it off so much. Wind is the only force the hooks work for. Squirrels and coons have no problem with hooks. They have hands like ours with claws for fingernails to help them climb trees and fight. Between the birdfeeders is a huge rhodedendron where I throw a fistful of seeds as high into the air as I can throw and let them sift down through the leaves to the ground. This gives the bluejays, the bullies of the birds because they're the biggest--the law of the jungle, a place to peck around on the ground and let smaller birds have the feeder. And the other way around; when bluejay is at the feeder, smaller birds peck on the ground. None of them are particular about feeder or ground for picking up seeds; the seed is all they want. Also, the seeds are spread evenly over a large enough area under the rhododendron that several birds can peck about and stay out of another bird's pecking range.

So it costs me a little bit a month for the seeds and allowing for the "mauraders" who are not bandits if I put something down for them too. About daily, a red squirrel will step inside the birdfeeder shelter, sit there with tail curled nibbling at the seeds. This happens after the seeds on the ground have run out; they're available to the birds too. This miniature forest out my front door between the house and the road has enough small trees with branches and rhododendron growing that hawks don't have a chance. I saw out the window a Cooper's hawk fly to the ground and stand surveying with a hawk's eye the obstacles for big wings that inhibit maneuvering. Another time I saw a beautiful gunmetal blue sparrow-hawk fly into the wooded zone and sit on the ridge of one of the birdfeeders, it too surveyed the obstacle course. The hawks flying into this zone cannot fly with abandon, it slows them down and distracts their focus of attention. The birds feeding all fly away the moment a hawk enters the wooded zone. The small birds can fly through the tree limbs with ease. All escape.

I love to watch them out the window, especially knowing my birds and squirrels are safe. I love having a pair of squirrels that amount to the same as hawk fodder, a lifespan of about a year, because hawks evidently get them all. This pair of red squirrels live successfully inside this zone that's hawk proof. It's been a year that I've been seeing them. I understand the environmentalist principle that feeding the critters influences them away from the grains they'd otherwise eat. It also turns out to be responsible for bird overpopulation of a given area beyond what can sustain them without people feeding birds. It's not like the birds are immortal. The seeds I feed them are healthy for them, seeds they can't find in their "natural environment." What about all the birds in the days when farms grew fields of grains to feed the horses, picking up the remains of the harvest from farm to farm? Following farming used to sustain huge bird populations, though the way monoculture farming is done now, it's death to the birds with chemicals that poison the bugs the birds eat. I'm not doing that. In fact, I'm not unbalancing anything. Even here in the mountains the human element is eradicating the birds as fast as it can be done. That doesn't strike me as natural balance.

The so-called natural world is so far out of balance that giving birds a safe place to have their choice of two sizes of sunflower seeds puts a miniscule spot of the planet into a little bit of balance for a short space of time. The more they eat here, the less they'll eat in the christmas tree fields 2/3 of the way around our safe zone. They sing to me spring and summer. This spot of ground was not a good haven for birds before I let the seedlings grow into saplings then trees and planted rhododendron, small ones dug up from the woods years ago. The so-called natural world is under assault by the human population responsible for a high rate of extinctions hourly around the globe for more than half a century. Assault is a gentle word for what is happening to the critters and to us, we the meat people.  Is that a healthy planet? Duh. Is that even a question? When everything living dies off, it will be too late to build a rocket to some moon of Saturn or into another solar system. The part I really don't get, and am afraid of going so far into a jaundiced point of view to get it, is why the human people who have been to college (corporate execs in skyscrapers = ivory towers) keep on with the destruction. The answer, though, is obvious as 1+1, even if you want to make it 11. Money is the only purpose. The only. It's gone so far by now the evidence is everywhere it's too late to turn around the mega-force in unstoppable motion until the house of cards skyscraper, after taking over our government, collapses of it's own too-big-to-fail. What comes next we've yet to see.

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