Dav

Sometime I want to play the game Nomic. The short version is that it’s a game where people modify the rules a lot. Kind of like a verbal version of Four Square that doesn’t tire you out or require a court to play.

My mother has been having an ongoing battle against the four or so squirrels that live in my backyard. This all started longer ago than I care to remember but has just been heating up again recently. The deal is that birds like birdseed, so we have a birdfeeder in our backyard to attract them, because apparently birds are nice to look at. Squirrels also like birdseed, and these squirrels are particularly clever, and are quite adept at getting it out of the feeder. Also apparently squirrels are not nice to look at, or so my parents decided.

Before the whole war started, we used to just sprinkle birdseed on the ground, but the squirrels ate a lot of it. So my parents bought a special squirrelproof feeder and hung it on a string between some trees. The squirrels figured out they could jump down from trees and knock into it really hard, which would spill delicious seeds out onto the ground below.

More recently, my parents did away with the string and brought the feeder much closer to the house where there are no nearby trees, and mounted it on a pole. Well, the squirrels learned how to climb the pole, so they covered the pole in vaseline to make it impossible to climb, but that was no deterrent.

The latest development was when my mother went out to gather briars to wrap around the pole. I told her, “You give those squirrels a week and they’ll be up there.” She was so confident that this would be the final strike that she placed 5 dollars on it. She came into my room with a fiver the very next morning.

Personally I think they should just stop trying to fight the squirrels and give them birdseed to eat. The squirrels get along just fine with the birds — I’ve seen it. They frolic together. But I hear rumors about a plan in the works to mount the bird feeder on the side of our house so there is no pole to climb. This isn’t over yet.