Wild Kingdom

We have several bird feeders hanging in an oak mott in our back yard. There are a couple of squirrels that hang out in the trees that enjoy the feeders as well. There is a truce between the birds and the squirrels - they share much nicer than our kids do. We enjoy watching the squirrels, and we don't begrudge them the small amount of bird feed they consume - usually.

But recently there has been a squirrel invasion. Hordes (packs? herds? swarms? flocks? pods?) of squirrels have discovered the feeders. At feeding time it looks like the local grocery store at the first of the month, when the Lone Star cards (i.e., food stamps) are recharged. The end result is that we have been refilling multiple feeders daily. So this morning we said no mas!

We smeared the rods from which the feeders hang with vaseline. That way the squirrels would be unable to climb down the rods and reach the feeders - we thought. Turns out the squirrels could slide down the rods just fine, like firemen sliding down a pole. What they couldn't do was climb back up.

Enter the dogs.

We have two mixed breed rescue dogs. They're basically mutts and relatively small (about 30 lbs. each), quick to learn, eager to please, and, for the most part well behaved, although we're still working on a few issues left over from their formative days.

They were abused early in their lives, and then abandoned (or they ran away). In any event, they lived on their own for a while, so they have an ingrained tendency to chase small game. Make that enthusiastically, vigorously, and intensely chase small game. In their teeny tiny little minds 'small game' is everything up to and including deer, cattle, and horses.

So now the stage is set. We have multiple squirrels trapped at the bottom of slippery rods they can't climb up. We have two dogs who simply MUST hunt down and consume said squirrels. And we have an unsuspecting human who forgot about the greased rods, but who notices that the dogs are quite insistent about going out.

The door is opened...

The dogs burst past me and make a mad dash for the feeders. Birds explode from the ground and from tree branches. Squirrels frantically try to climb up the rods to the safety of the tree limbs. I'm frozen in place thinking WTF?

The feeders are hanging so low the dogs can almost - almost - jump up and snatch the squirrels off the feeders. Once or twice they even take a nip out of a bushy tail. This spurs the squirrels to even greater efforts to escape. They can claw their way up the rods a few inches, but then gravity and vaseline take over and they slowly, agonizingly, inevitably slide back down within range of the leaping canines.

At this point let me interject and say I'm not a Disney-style nature lover. I value and appreciate nature, but I recognize its cruel side. Eat or be eaten and all that. I'm also not particularly squeamish. I remember my grandmother grabbing a hen for Sunday dinner, wringing its neck, and then showing me how to pluck and clean it. I hunt, clean my own kills, and process the meat for our consumption. But somehow I couldn't tolerate the thought of watching squirrels get torn to pieces in front of me. So I decided to take action. 

Squirrels are chattering and sliding. Dogs are barking and leaping. I'm running out to corral the dogs and yelling. I'm also barefoot, so I'm stepping on stones, sticks, and burrs, which adds emotion, volume, and profanity to the yelling.

I wish there was a video of this. The dogs' leaps were timed so that one went up as the other went down. I would run over to one just as it launched itself, then turn and run over to the other only to watch it surge upwards as I got there. After repeating this several times I finally figured out that if I just stayed in one place I could grab a dog as it came down. Then I headed for the house with an armful of struggling and squirming hound. I threw the first one in the house, slammed the door, and repeated the process with the second one. Then I slumped down with my back to the door, sweating, panting, bleeding from scratches on my arms and cuts in my feet, and cussing like the Army mechanic I used to be.

That's when my wife walked in.

She's still laughing...