Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Neighborhood Visitors

The other night Rob and I were awakened to a noise in the wall behind our heads!

We suspected a critter had found its way into the chimney walls and lo and behold the very next afternoon Rob saw this little chipmunk sunning itself on our teeny tiny wood pile.

This did not make us happy so I immediately visited my favorite online information gathering site and shared with Rob several different ways to trap and remove those cute little annoyances from our premises.

The easiest (and least messy?) way seemed almost too good to be true. It consists of filling a five-gallon bucket not quite half full of water and dumping a layer of sunflower seeds on top. These float across the top and the little chipper thinks "OH, A Yummy Treat! Just For ME!" and jumps in to partake.

Chipmunks can't swim. That's all I will say, in case there are young children (or Alaina) reading this post.

Well. It rained this morning. Enough to raise the level of seeds in the bucket. Apparently our neighborhood squirrel, who has, up until this point, wisely stayed on the hill, away from our house, couldn't resist the offer of a free lunch.

Unfortunately, he is big enough that he just bends over, grabs a pawful of seeds and chows down. We even bought the ones that are already hulled so he doesn't even have to work for them.

Happy Squirrel.


I miss the owls that were around last summer.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh wow! I was shocked, then laughed. Funny funny.

Laurie HF said...

Somehow I don't think a bucket of seeds will work for the four legged antlered pests that we have around here. At least they stay in the hills during the summer.

Sue said...

Well, it worked - stoked on by that success Rob has now got wasp traps set out on the deck.

I don't know of anything that will keep anything with antlers out of your yard (unless you invest in an 8 foot high electric fence).