Faith, Folklore, and Friends

I have written before about my love/hate relationship with our shag-bark hickory tree, here  and  here. The tree provides a home for squirrels and birds and countless insects and smaller organisms. It is the only tree we have that is tall enough to shade the house from the afternoon sun.  It is so pretty, and there is no way we would ever cut it. Every other year, it has a bumper crop of nuts, many of which fall on the deck.  Usually, when they fall, the hull breaks into four pieces, expelling the nut.  We try to keep them off the deck (stepping on them could cause a fall) and have already picked up bags and bags of them. It has become a daily ritual, picking up the hickory nuts. There is still about a million of them on the tree. Our dog, Sherlock, gets excited when we start picking them up, and he eats them.  Yes, that's what I said, he eats them.  He breaks the hickory nut in his jaw, spits it out, and eats the good part. Hub is am...

In early January, I told you  here  about my new bird feeder and how it promised to be squirrel proof. Have you been wondering how that is working out for us? You would think that the squirrels would be so full of tomatoes that they would leave the sunflower seeds alone.  Maybe they think of it as dessert.

Y'all know we have trouble with squirrels; I wrote about them here and here .  In another bold attempt to keep the squirrels out of the bird food, Hub gifted me with this new bird feeder, advertised as squirrel proof . So far, we haven't seen any squirrels attempting to get the seed.  The day we put it up, a big bird ran all the other ones off, so we hadn't seen many birds, either.  Time will tell.

The only squirrels we saw when we were children was on the eating table, fried or surrounded by dumplings.  The squirrels respected my daddy's shotgun enough to stay hidden in the woods.  Nowadays,  they are everywhere.  It is a constant battle with the bird feeders, one that I have lost up 'til now, but hope springs eternal.  I usually try not to get too steamed up about it, but they have made me fighting mad this time. We live in a subdivision, with a lot that is roughly .6 acre.  After room for the house, the driveway, and the front yard, we have very little space to garden.  We have to carefully decide what we are going to grow to make the most of our tiny space.  We don't have enough to share with squirrels.   Above, you can see they took a tomato and discarded it after a few bites; maybe they didn't like it quite so green.   This year, we decided to plant three small rows of corn, looking forward to a freezer s...

Our internet has been sporadic for several weeks.  Last week, it completely quit so we had to have a Comcast technician to come and repair it on Saturday afternoon.  He replaced the modem, and the internet worked fine.  Until Monday morning.  We called again, and another technician came late yesterday.  He checked all the connections outside.  He found that the squirrels, who apparently own this place, had chewed the cable lines almost in two where they connected at the pole.  He replaced everything necessary, and we are good to go this morning. This just goes to show that no matter how smart we get, there are always unanticipated things that can so wrong, like hungry squirrels. I'm guessing the squirrels are tired of sunflower seed.

If you have read this blog for a while, you know about my never-ending battle with squirrels.  I love my birds, and it is a constant struggle to keep the squirrels out of their food.  Hub took down the wooden post with four bird feeders because it was just too easy for the squirrels to get to.  He assured me that the squirrels would never be able to climb the little metal post he replaced it with. Shortly after I shot these photos, I smeared a heavy coating of Vaseline on the poles.  We'll see if that works. *Photos were made through a window; the squirrels would never let me get this close to them otherwise.

It's a good year for hickory nuts. Hickory trees are a hardwood that has been used for fences, furniture, and switches. Someone cooking 'way back yonder' discovered food had a different taste when it was cooked over hickory sticks or coals. Once used as food by native Americans and settlers, the nuts are most highly valued by squirrels now. When I went squirrel-hunting with my daddy as a child, we would look for hickory trees, knowing that would be where we would find the most squirrels. Daddy liked to go real early, when most animals and little girls were still sleeping, so my trips with him were few and sporadic. Our house has a huge scalybark hickory tree just off the deck in the back. This majestic tree provides shade for the house and yard. It is home to countless birds and insects. This time of year, when the mature nuts are falling, the hickory tree and the ground under it teems with squirrels gathering for winter. If my daddy was still living and wanted to ...