Category Archives: environment

Squirrels: my garden wars

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The squirrels and I stare at each other across the garden. I used to yell and threaten assault. I’m over that. I’m also over verbal negotiations. They would sit on the top of the fence with evil in their eyes as I explained the bird feeder was not for them but for the robins, cardinals, random blue jay, three mourning doves, numerous sparrows, and a couple other little birds I couldn’t identify. 

I spoke with authority while they sized me up. They understood, I know they did, but the message coming back was they would make their own decisions regarding feathered creatures. 

The cylindrical bird feeder—guaranteed squirrel proof and large bird (vultures?) proof—hung from a 20” metal rod screwed to my ivy-covered fence. 

Did you know a squirrel can hang suspended in air on a diagonal across 20” with one hind foot holding to an ivy vine and one front foot at the base of a bird feeder scooping out seeds without setting off the shut-down mechanism that seals off the seeds from creatures that weigh more than your average bird?

I replaced the 20” rod with a 39” rod with a 1/2” radius, screwed it into the fence at a 45 degree slant, and smiled in victory. For 24 hours.

The alpha squirrel—yes, there is an alpha squirrel, a beta squirrel, a third-rank squirrel, and a small black squirrel that keeps its own company—then jumped off the fence onto the 39” rod about 8” from where it attached to the fence. 

Birdseed spilled to the ground as the rod wobbled and wobbled. A flawless distribution system!

The alpha squirrel then jumped into the fracas of grey squirrels fighting over seeds and bits of fruit, tails shaking, teeth nattering. “Oh, what fun. I’ll do that again.” Up the fence, jump, wobble, sunflower seeds raining on my flattened iris. 

I’m rather fond of the little black squirrel. He waits until the coast is clear and seems less greedy.

Up for this fight, I ordered 4” steel spikes on overnight delivery—spikes that fit into a plastic strip you adhere to a rod, fence, or wherever you don’t want cats, squirrels, or vultures. I ordered more than I could possibly use.

I “loaded” the spikes into the base strips and attached the strips to the rod with the plastic bands used for handcuffs—not only on the top of the rod but around it for 30 inches up from the fence.

I smiled in victory. For 24 hours. Then, passing a window, I saw the rod bouncing up and down.

As I stared, alpha squirrel, now named Brute, ran up the fence, assumed flight position, and vaulted over the spikes, landing on the top 9” of the rod not covered with spikes. The wobble was magnificent!

I ordered more spikes for next day delivery, and covered every inch of that rod. It may be receiving messages from 1000s of lightyears away. 

Brute, beady-eyed, paced the top of the fence, back and forth, squatted, took measurements, paced more, squatted again, and took more measurements: angles, distance, spike length, possibly even wind velocity and direction. Hungry supplicants waited below.

Suddenly Brute crouched and launched himself across the distance, landing on the top of the rod between 4″ sharp steel spikes no more than 1 to 1 1/2″ apart.

It was a courageous jump, magnificent even. With no place to settle in, he turned in one motion, leapt sideways against the wall, and slid down for food. He did this three more times before I turned away in mounting horror.

Those spikes are sharp and dangerous! Sooner or later a squirrel was bound to be injured. 

My feeling became nuanced. Squirrels need to eat too, they are probably kind to their babies, and their calculation and acrobatic skills were improving daily. That must have felt good to them.

For two days I checked for squirrel blood on the ground. I let the feeder go empty. I did not win, they did not win, and the birds did not win.

Perhaps a squirrel was injured—Brute.

Yesterday I put seeds in the feeder again. This morning the beta squirrel made itself skinny and wove slowly, carefully, with precision between the spikes to the top of the rod. No grandiosity, just skill. I named it Dr. Fauci.

Dr. Fauci can only make the rod shake a little bit because it has no safe space along the way to jump up and down to get the wobble going. Squirrel Romper Room days may be over as only a few seeds drop to the ground with each of Fauci’s painstaking efforts. It is a compromise I can live with.

I have not seen Brute, but the birds are returning.

[Note from 24 hours later: Brute returned and learned from watching Dr. Fauci to wiggle between the spikes. His weight alone makes the rod wobble enough to feed his insatiable followers.]

Lessons learned:

1) Squirrels do not obey verbal commands.

2) Squirrels can stretch twice their natural length head to toe.

3) Squirrels discriminate.

4) Squirrels hold grudges.

5) You cannot outmaneuver a squirrel more than 24 hours. 

Not a Good Time to Place Bets

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We are on a bridge of uncertainty and do not know what is on the other side. Mr. Rogers told us to look for the helpers. We are learning we are the helpers.

. . . . .

Admit it, you’re not sure of anything right now. Okay, maybe YOU are sure of something but most of us aren’t, and a lot of us would not agree with your version of things because even we introverts are getting a little stir crazy and a good argument would cut through the fog of not knowing. There is a desire to violate.

For me that would be something like drinking a coke. Not really blasphemous, only slightly harming myself. No god will destroy the world because I drank a coke or will turn me into a pillar of salt because I looked at the destruction.

Okay, it’s not a proven destruction yet. We don’t really know what it is, and not many of us believe there is a vengeful god wreaking havoc on us because we don’t fit its description of obedient servants. We did this on our own and mythology does not serve us well.

What is real is that only a few people are overarching leaders with sharp minds, compassionate souls, and the ability to pull best actions out of scientific facts—and we need such people now. (Saluting you, Dr. Fauci.)

Our administration is not equipped—mentally, emotionally, morally—to deal with a pandemic. They stumble blind in a maze of ignorance, arrogance, and surprise that a deadly inconvenience is disrupting their presumptions they made America great again. They have put us in peril.

We are on a bridge of uncertainty and do not know what is on the other side. Mr. Rogers told us to look for the helpers. We are learning we are the helpers. 

We have become creative, turning to our friends and neighbors, and returning to ourselves—some of us perhaps going through the pains (and joys) of self-discovery and taking a fearless moral inventory for the first time.

We reach out and have come closer to others by not being able to touch each other. We slow down, turn to the arts, and try not to violate others, not to slice through the fog as a defense against not knowing.

We do not know when it will end, we do not know how many will die, we do not know how many others will be weakened, we do not know who is in trouble, who will disappear, who will have food for themselves and their families and who will not, who will be destitute, who will wake and say “I am not who I thought I was.”

We do not know if lessons will be learned and kept that will change how we live, if we will stop destroying our beloved earth, if we will be kinder to others. We do not know.

Some people are buying guns as though a virus can be shot. Who do they think will attack them? I sense these are the same people who believe in a vengeful god, and that monsters exist in all people and that deprivation will make those monsters rise against them for their food and toilet paper.

Still, it is the doctors, and nurses, and garbage collectors, and grocery suppliers that lead—and the food banks and fruit and vegetable pickers. At great risk, at great risk. They do best actions with the facts before them.

May we all do the same. May we learn—actually feel—the connected rhythms of life that include viruses and fears along with love and blossoming. May we endure and embrace and sort though to what serves best.

We will create what is on the other side of the bridge, using or ignoring the lessons we learn now. We can join hands safety. We can create harmonies that hold and stabilize through troubles.

If we do not, . . . oh, well, just one more planet in an unending cosmos that either knows itself or does not, that gives birth and absorbs death with startling nonchalance.

Elephants cry. These large beautiful beasts cry. Somehow that is relevant. I don’t know how.


End of our World: This is not a time to be stupid

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Formation of earth—explosion, fire, water to land, hot core, first ferns, beginning of eyes, of seeing, hearing, knowing—to humanoids arriving in the last sliver of a 10-foot-long timeline or last millisecond of since forever. Yet, this truth never convinces us how wispy we are. After all, we tickled out the timelines. We are the culmination, where the timeline always intended to go. We are creatures that know we know.

Years ago in Davos, Switzerland I heard a woman crow that her astrophysicist husband had done the math and it is impossible that advanced life exists anywhere else in the cosmos. Please, if you’re going to be stupid, do it on your own merit, don’t borrow from someone else. 

But we are all delusional. We may read timelines but know nothing of what was before. We may split atoms, chart elements, discover there are no smudges, only separate units going infinitely into minutia and infinity. We may study weak and strong forces, gravity, magnetism, inertia, and pheromones, but we only learn what they do, not why they do it. 

  It’s easy to believe something really really weird is real, but hard to think how it could be.–7-year-old girl

We resist the bald truth that there seems to be no reason for us, that we may exist only because we can and the value of our lives is a construct of evolution that we should be happy and reproduce–or seek happiness and therefore reproduce. We resist it by creating myths that are not nearly so interesting.

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?—Mary Oliver 

The chill is still on for this spring. I sit inside by a fire with my dog beside me. I pet him behind his ears as we stare at flames as humans and gentler wolves have always done. Fire has been fire since the beginning of the timeline—atoms vibrate off each other faster and faster, faster than local gossip, faster than lust, touching our skin, our hopes, our tomorrows, taming and recharging us. 

There is nothing of his ancestors in my dog that I can see, his killer instinct limited to barking over his weight class and slamming himself against the door when men in uniform deliver packages or other dogs intrude on his territory. He is fed from cans supplemented by home-cooked basmati rice with ground chicken or turkey. He can carry a grudge but only for a little time. He is getting older and sometimes wobbles. I worry. A lot.

  A dog is one of the few things in life that is as it seems.—Mark J. Asher

You and I may never see hard evidence of complex life elsewhere in the universe, but we know that whatever created light and dogs isn’t going to stop with us. Whatever expands, creates, and melds substance with wave and intent is not going to stop now. 

If we demolish earth as a home for complex organisms, the universe will not care. We are a millisecond, a sliver. We will be hopped over for millennia until another life form emerges, new creatures that believe they know what they know. Perhaps they actually will, perhaps they will be kinder than we have been. 

God, I think, is what is alive in us. God is life—balance, rhythm, stop and start, nectar for bees, seeds for birds, buds for blooms. She is nesting, reproduction, line and form against line and form. She is what is physical and what is beyond physical, the transference from fire to air to face. She is movement, orbs, attraction, spinning atoms, laughter at strange times out of nowhere. 

Evolution will continue if we knock ourselves out of the running. Life does not need humans.

  Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, it’s not going to get better. It’s not.—The Lorax

We are a creative, beguiling, and misguided millisecond. If we wish for more than that, we can no longer be stupid on our own or borrowed from others.