Bird Food Not Eaten by Birds but eaten by squirrels
Oct 31st, 2007 by Birdy Trish
I’m fed up. The squirrel has the garden as his second home. He seems to come late morning. I bang on the window to get rid of it - it isn’t frightened of me. I open the window and shout at it - it isn’t really bothered. It’s a rat with a long tail.
I have seen it twice this morning sitting on the bird table and eating all the bird food that I had just put out - not a bird in sight.
It’s been sitting on the lawn. Sitting on the fence. Grey squirrels have been pest for years. This is the first time one has come to my bird table. Humbert Wolfe was a poet who died in 1940. He wrote this poem about the grey squirrel.
Like a small grey
coffee pot,
sits the squirrel.
He is not
all he should be,
kills by dozens
trees, and eats
his red-brown cousins.
The keeper on the
other hand,
who shot him, is
a Christian and
loves his enemies,
which shows
the squirrel was not
one of those.
The grey squirrel could be damaging our little copse of trees. We don’t have many trees and they provide shelter from the wind for us and a place to live for birds and animals. We can’t afford to lose any trees just because of a grey squirrel.
I remember the words of a poem that, I think was written from view of a bird -
Break not a branch, nor harm a tree
This little copse is home to me.
What is the answer?
