Squirrels of the Future

 I've never really liked squirrels. When I was a kid we had a next-door neighbor who fed the squirrels in her yard. She fed them Dubuque, Iowa's very fine Betty Jane candies. I can see her out there in her flowered housecoat with a box of chocolates, a squirrel eating out her hand. It seemed like things could take a turn at any moment, and I didn't want to witness it. 

My very first house in L.A. had a pecan tree. We never harvested a single pecan. My daughters, however did enjoy watching the squirrels strip it bare. They'd sit at our kitchen table and laugh out loud at the squirrels' ridiculous gymnastics. I was less than thrilled. I wanted to make something with those homegrown pecans.

Post divorce, the very first place I ever owned by myself, I had an apricot tree. That first apricot I harvested was the best apricot I've ever eaten. It was the last apricot I enjoyed from that tree. The squirrels also ate my lovely ruffled pink hibiscus. 

I tried everything. Bird netting. Cayenne. Nothing worked.

When it came time to move my mother in with me, I sold that place and bought a house that fit her needs. There were no squirrels there by the ocean. Until after DJT was elected. Then things changed. I gave those interlopers names--Evil Bannon and Kelly Ann. They pigged out on the bird seed and destroyed my geraniums.

Minneapolis is overrun with squirrels. Last year I saw a pure white one. On my walk the other day I watched the fat one at the top of this post for quite awhile. Do you know why he/she is fat? Because they're planning for the future. That's right. The future. That squirrel knows it's going to get cold. There'll be less to eat in our snowy landscape. Calories will harder to find. So the squirrels are chowing down. So they'll survive. Because they think there will be a future to survive for. I love that squirrel and all of their fat friends. I love the idea of planning for the future.

Resist

I've been feeding finches, black-crowned sparrows, and a pair of ring-necked doves from one of those suction-cup bird feeders since my mom moved in with me the summer of 2012. I put up hummingbird feeders too, and it took a bit of finagling to find a spot where the possums couldn't tip them up like  growlers of beer, but ultimately we had a fine success.

A week or so ago (around the time of the Inauguration) I saw a squirrel in the street in front of my house. There are no squirrels in this neighborhood--or at least I hadn't seen any in the almost 5 years that I've lived here. You could be mugged by an army of rabbits while out walking around here at night, or hissed at by a possum, but there were absolutely no squirrels.

Yesterday and today, I saw this:

I've chased him off twice.

And I've moved the feeder higher, so maybe the Evil Bannon (the squirrel's name) won't be able to leap from the window ledge into the feeder. It remains to be seen if he will be able to leap from the wall into the feeder. Maybe that's a reason not to have a wall. But then my neighbor might come over, right?

I will resist.

And speaking of that, Southern California friends, will I see you in L.A. Sunday?https://www.facebook.com/events/1371706059569756/

If you're going to be there, let me know.

Sunday Pray-er or The Mantis Religiosa

The quotes below the photos are an amalgam of info from Wikipedia, the National Geographic Website, the University of Kentucky and Dave's Garden:

More commonly known as the Praying Mantis, these most recent visitors to my patio are "named for their prominent front legs, which are bent and held together at an angle that suggests the position of prayer. The scientific name Mantodea comes from the Greek words μάντις meaning a prophet, and εἶδος for form or shape.  Mantis refers to the genus mantis, to which only some praying mantids belong. Historically, the term mantid was used to refer to any member of the order because for most of the past century, only one family was recognized within the order; technically, however, the term only refers to this one family, meaning the species in the other 14 recently established families are not mantids, by definition (i.e., they are empusids, or hymenopodids, etc.), and the term "mantises" should be used when referring to the entire order." 

I'm afraid I'd have to pray for a more scientific brain before I understand all that.I'm going with the common "praying mantis,"--because I'm common. Maybe for the purposes of impressing someone, I will use the very learned sounding "Mantis Religiosa." "Stagmomantis californica" or "California Mantis" would probably be correct, too.


I spotted the green one in the picture above while pruning my hibiscus hedge. The next day while having my lunch on the patio, this one appeared.

Some of the info on the Internet says mantises change color like chameleons--which these photos seem to bear out, but other sites claim that color changes are due to molting, or that color is pre-determined and mantises choose an environment based on their color. Which doesn't really explain why we had a green mantis on the brown patio umbrella pole last fall--unless dropping into Haley's salad was a pre-meditated event.


Female mantises are reputed to engage in predatory mating behavior--but that could be a lab study anomaly due to bright lights, etc. In a more natural setting males have been observed engaging the female in a courtship dance in order to change her interest from feeding to mating. Take heed, human males. 


Other mantis trivia worth noting: "Mantises are exclusively predatory. Insects form the primary diet, but larger species have been known to prey on small scorpions,lizards, frogs, birds, snakes, fish, and even rodents."


Dear Mantises,
Please do not eat any birds or the snake. Here is your menu:

I recommend "écureuil tres jeune." They're more tender when they're small.

A female mantis lays 12 to 40 eggs every fall.I'll be on the lookout for those egg sacks so I don't disturb them. And if anyone knows how I can make the mantises big enough to devour a squirrel let me know.

Squirrel Underpants or Now I Understand Everything

My patio wall is "nut highway." Which is not to say it is populated by religious zealots holding signs predicting the end of the world, or that goofy sect of Catholics promulgating their theory that Galileo was wrong after all. Squirrels. I'm talking about squirrels. It's rush hour on my patio wall all day long. Acorns being ferried south. Pecans being transported north. Chattering and posturing, up the towering grevalia trees and down, through my scraggly hibiscus hedge, up my denuded apricot tree and into the neighbors' flowering pear. Complete fucking squirrely nuttiness, and I am contemplating mayhem.

I have eaten exactly one apricot from my tree in the four years I've lived here. True, I travel a lot.  And I've done some STUPID THINGS. If I stayed home more often, I could tend things better. Next spring when the apricots appear, I hope to be here installing robotic owls or motion sensitive barking devices. Maybe I'll coat every branch of the tree with vaseline or chili pepper or encase each little green precursor of golden fruit into its own tiny wire cage.
                                                                          

Or maybe I'll buy a gross of these and wrestle the furry-tailed little shits into some tighty whiteys and hope for a reduced squirrel sperm count.

I know there are people who love squirrels. I apologize. But I love my paltry and petite urban garden. I want to pick bowls of blueberries and strawberries and stir them into my yogurt. I want apricots heaped into the fruit bowl on my kitchen counter. I want a handful of kumquats every damn day that they're in season. I don't want squirrels.




I used to eat squirrel when I was a kid. My dad hunted them and my mom served them up with gravy. My dad helped me tie the fluffy tails to my tricycle handles. I don't own a bike now, and I'm a vegetarian or maybe I could more actively solve this problem, you know what I mean?

My patio is also home to two kinds of geraniums, three rose bushes, two colors of kalanchoe, camellias, hydrangeas, impatiens, jasmine, bougainvillea, calla lilies, and several varieties of hibiscus. Can we talk about the hibiscus for a minute? The flowers are pretty enough although there's no scent, and they're not good for cutting. Which means that the only reason to keep battling the white fly that so dearly loves them is the flowers in situ. But I don't have a lot of flowers. Which, as I've said, is the whole point of hibiscus-ness. I should feed them more, I thought. Do a better job of keeping the whitefly off them. I should prune more--or prune less.

Today I understood everything.

If you see a squirrel in underpants, I'm responsible.

photo credit for "Squirrel Underpants": www.squirrelunderpants.com/ "Protect the world from squirrel nudity!"