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Caught in the Act
December 12, 2006
I got so distracted by the race numbers yesterday that I forgot about the weekend squirrel antics. A few weeks ago we noticed the birdfeeder out of skew on the treadle; we suspected a fox squirrel. A while after that, when I was not home, Mr. Karen witnessed a demonstration of how such a thing could happen—the squirrel positioned itself on a branch above the feeder and held on with its back legs while it reeeaaaached out with its front paws to get a grip under the baffle and swing itself down. He said it them squeezed itself inside the feeder, which I found hard to picture given how close the bars are together and how little space is inside them relative to the size of the tubby cubby squirrels that frequent our yard. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe—Mr. Karen is a reliable source, and I’d once seen one of our guinea pigs escape from the play area we’d set up by forcing her way through a gap that appeared to me to be much too small for her—I just wished I could have seen it for myself. Well, this past weekend I got the next best thing; I didn’t see the move from branch to feeder, but I did get to see the results more than once, as well as a few aborted attempts. We’re going to have to get a bigger baffle.
