Welcome Aboard!

Welcome!

Let me start off by saying, I'm a little kooky when it comes to the critters that roam my backyard. Well I guess I should really say control my backyard, although I'm the one with opposable thumbs and a larger brain, I most certainly do not reign completely over the yard.

I've been toying with the idea of starting this blog based entirely on the happenings of the critters in my yard (the squirrels most specifically), and the action of today finally got me to say "That's it! I'm making that blog!"

We are friend to almost all life in our backyard. We have feeders with seed and suet, squirrel boxes loaded with corn and sunflowers, hummingbird feeders, flowers and a vegetable garden.  Most nice days you can find my mother or myself outside getting a bit dirty somehow.

My mother and I love our yard. We made a terra cotta pot birdbath that sits in our round garden bed surrounded by flowers and other statues. We plant various vegetables every year (tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, peppers), and have roses and a wall of morning glories. 

We have erected two 4"x4" posts in our yard, adorned them with hooks and hang either bird feeders or hanging tomatoes on them. Initially we had some mischievous squirrels eating from the sunflower feeders but after placing a baffle around the post and a squirrel feeder under the baffle, that problem was shortly eliminated. We have found that a simple solution to keeping the squirrels off our bird feeders, is to provide them their own source of food. Raccoons and skunks don't really care whether the food was intended for them, as long as they can eat it.

Now, let me get to the point. We have a bunch of squirrels who frequent our backyard, and most of them can now recognize the sound of the back door opening and will come running for peanuts when they hear it. Most of them will actually take nuts from my hands now. And when I say a bunch of squirrels, I mean a bunch; at least 6-7 different ones and yes they all come to the door and look in on occasion. In fact, they've grown so accustomed to door = peanuts that they have taken to throwing themselves into the door to get our attention. With so many squirrels, we hear our share of fights and chasing that we go look outside when we hear a calamity but yesterday was a different case. After hearing the hubbub I peeked through the curtain on the back door to find one of the squirrels standing on the handle for the door, as if it were an attempt to open it. In order to remedy this we turned the handle to its vertical position so it would no longer be a perch. 

Lo and behold, today they have shown me they are not as dumb as they look. Even though the handle was turned, they found a way to grab onto it and and scratch at the door with their back feet and get our attention. I heard the scratching and looked to see this crazy little fur-ball hanging on to the door knob. When I arrived, he/she let go and sat looking up at me waiting for the reward to their cleverness. So I grabbed my camera and pulled up a chair to see what would happen if I sat and waited.

After staring at me for a few minutes with a somewhat agitated look because they had not received their prize, he/she decided maybe I hadn't heard them so they needed another attempt. So he/she climbed up on the banister to the left of the door and threw them self into the glass.. but still no peanut.. continuing their determination he/she climbed onto the banister on the right side of the door (which has the handle) and jumped on to the handle and sat there staring at me through the glass long enough for me to snag this picture because without it I fear no one would believe me.