Grey Squirrel Wars begin for 2021

I may have talked about this before but its something that gets to me regularly. Our garden backs on to a copse of trees and includes a large oak of its own (120+ years old according to the girth measurements).

There are obvious advantages to this type of garden, lots of varied wildlife being one. There are disadvantages, the garden is shaded, dried by the trees and autumn deposits large quantities of leaves which take a couple of years to rot down. However, the worst disadvantage is a family of grey squirrels (or tree rats). Not only do they eat the apples off our trees (well they peel them and drop the rest all over the place) but they also chew at anything that looks like it might be edible (strawberries in particular) which means that everything has to be netted and finally we have a competition knowing whether we feed the birds or the squirrels.

This year we saw them trying to build a nest in one of the trees on our boundary, throwing a few stones whilst they were there seemed to be enough to discourage them from that tree but all they did was move to a tree slightly further away, out of stones throw. So now we have a regular stream of squirrels circling the gar

We though we’d won with a “plastic dome” which stops the squirrels climbing straight up and onto the feeders, its interesting to see how they scrabble around trying to get around the dome. At least that was until last week when we noticed that there was a squirrel on the feeders. Then we had to sit and watch how it was getting there. After half an hour or so, it was obvious, just jump high enough to grab hold. The solution was to raise the dome another couple of inches. The squirrel then jumped up and bounced off the dome. It tried five or six times and then gave up.