Fat Bushy-tailed Tree Rats

These are not our favorite animals as their functions in life seem to be 1. eat everything, 2. chew on everything, 3. dig up everything, and mostly in that order. This is the largest squirrel native to N. America, the so-called fox squirrel, and everyone but gardeners think them cute and handsome. Our estate is home to a dozen or so individuals at any given point in time. Often anywhere from 8 to 18 can be seen here and there around the gardens. If you have any that are fatter than these you'll have to prove it because it may not be possible. These are midwestern corn and squash seed, along with sunflower seed fattened squirrels. This particular fellow is disposing of stale, ancient raisins, so they do have some trivial uses as food disposals. If times ever get too tough squirrel stew will be on the menu. One of our residents this year has 3 or 4 prominent whitish scars that look as though they were caused by talons, a close call with a red-tailed hawk perhaps. The worst thing they do is chew the bark from tree limbs to get at the inner bark, and many of the limbs that fall show evidence of such limb-damaging or limb-killing girdling activity. Even worse than the bun-buns, the bark gnawing takes place way up in the canopy, so no caging will help. And they are not fast learners; they'll eat a magnolia flower bud, find it distasteful and move to the next as if the outcome might be different, and one year they chewed all but one flower bud on a big-leaf magnolia, and about then you begin thinking about squirrel stew again. They do provide diversion, a sort of cat TV entertainment for the kitty-girls. We had a big, big cat who seemed to delight in treeing squirrels and then hanging around to listen to their shrill scolding. Does your wildlife need to be diversified?  Let us know.

Fox squirrel

Here's one of our big garden problems.  One of the dozen and a half or so fox squirrels that live on our estate.  Of the three species of squirrel that live in eastern N. America, this is the largest by far.  This particular fellow found the decorative gourds that were just discarded and cucurbit seeds are one of the favorite foods of this mob even if they have to take them from the squash still growing on your vine.  Of course, you detect the biggest problem of all, they're cute, almost adorable, animals even though in general they act more like sewer rats with a big fluffy tail. OK, TPP hates to admit that they like their wildlife, even the troublesome ones. Within 2 hours all of these gourds were quite hollow.  Notice how starved and under nourished our squirrel looks.  Life is tough.   

Marmot hits the salad reset button

One of the great thing about having a spacious estate is that it is attractive to wild life, and this is also a problem, a two seasonal problem.  During the winter, rabbits rather indiscriminately prune any trees or shrubs to which they have access, and each year hundreds of feet of fencing are  deployed to establish no bark/twig-eating zones with varying degrees of success (this year - poor Kerria, but look, the flowering quince is recovering from last year).   Then comes spring, and rabbits get better fodder in other places.  Each year, actually several times each year, a woodchuck sets up residence either under the garden shed or the pavilion, and they are such nice animals, really, but their appetites are beyond the ability of small gardens to provide, especially early in the season.  Later in the season they may be content to simply strip all the tasty leaves off your okra (they really like okra) or squash vines, or eat all your parsley (they love parsley; leaves their breath so fresh), but early in the season, the plants are small with limited amounts of biomass.  So all of our just-getting-nicely-established broccoli and bib lettuce seedlings provided a rather small salad the other night.  Of course this is still earlier in the season than such seedlings are usually planted, but such gluttony always proves to be a tad annoying, especially since the seedling bed was protected by some garden fencing.  Maybe Mrs. Phactor will now allow me to revisit plans for a mine field.