The bushy-tailed bully

By MATT MILNER Courier staff writer

April 30, 2008 01:15 pm

— There’s a small rodent that has a vendetta against me and my family.
Well, not so small. This particular squirrel could probably feed a family of six and still have leftovers. It looks like a squirrel in a fat suit. And it hates me.
I guess things transferred from my wife, who initially drew the squirrel’s ire. Let me start at the beginning.
We put out a bird feeder this past winter, when it became clear that the snow wasn’t going away anytime soon. We knew the neighborhood squirrels would raid the thing, and that was no problem.
I welcomed it, actually. My great-grandmother used to wake up early when we visited so we could watch the squirrels in her backyard. I’ve liked squirrels ever since.
So my wife and I thought it was funny when she looked out and saw the squirrel hanging from the branch with its back feet, using its hands to tip the bird feeder upside down to spill the seeds. I was impressed that the squirrel was that inventive.
But then it got lazy. It simply bit through the rope suspending the feeder and dropped it to the ground. We bought another. The squirrel nipped again.
This time my wife saw it. She went out and retrieved the feeder before the squirrel could raid it. He went ballistic, barking and yipping at her.
That’s been the pattern ever since. If the squirrel sees her it lets loose with a string of what I assume are unprintable squirrel curses. I’d be worried about my kids hearing that kind of language, but I don’t think they speak squirrel.
We didn’t help the situation when we put up a third feeder using a metal chain. The squirrel knows he can’t chew through that one, and he doesn’t like it one bit.
We pretty much ignore the squirrel now. It can get our attention every now and then with a particularly vituperative outburst. First squirrel I’ve ever known that needs an anger management class.
You have to admire it in some ways, though. We’re bigger. The squirrel is, at best, a client at our bird feeder. It dips in occasionally for a few seeds. And we look the other way when it does.
It’s tempting to read it as an allegory for the government, with the squirrel as a taxpayer. It wants things to change. But that won’t happen, no matter how hard it barks. We know better than it.
For all the rhetoric about people controlling the government, we react like that squirrel far too often. We bark and yip, only to shut up when the federal government tosses a couple sunflower seeds our way. And then we re-elect the people we barked at a couple months before.
There was a time when government feared the people. I’m not advocating a return to that. But it would be nice if it respected us once in a while.
As much as I like the creatures, I hate seeing myself as a squirrel.

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