This year has been very strange in that we have had so many squirrels and chipmunks running around our backyard. I started by placing the chipmunks traps near hostas, and I ended up catching about 10 or 11 in three weeks. Like always I end up driving them about a mile away and letting them go in the Tamarack Swamp.
Now usually, I trap them because they would be digging up Kris's flowers burying seeds. However, I noticed that for whatever reason the chipmunks were collecting the seed that the birds dropped on the ground from the bird feeders and they weren't digging in the pots. So I thought, why should I trap them? If they aren't bothering me, or digging up Kris's flowers, then I really don't care, and I just let them be. So that gets us to the squirrels.
The chipmunks have been fine... not so much the squirrels. First, they managed to get at the bird feeders, both the seed and the suet. And once they did get at them, they started chewing the feeders apart. Every time I saw one getting at the seed, I would go outside and chase it away. Once they stopped doing that, I noticed that they had started sitting in Kris's flower pots, eating their seeds that they got either from the feeders, or from the ground. And then they began to start breaking off the buds from Kris's Hybiscus plants. I have never seen that before, so it was very strange that they would start tearing the flowers apart. Luckily, they only got at about 5 or 6 buds before we got them scared away. So now I am going to have to monitor the plants to make sure they don't kill all of Kris's flowers. And I can't really trap them, because the chipmunk traps are not big enough for them. I did catch one in a chipmunk trap once, and before I could let it go, the squirrel pretty much went nuts running around inside of it until it had knocked the trap over, which ended up releasing the door, and it got away. I am at the point where I am considering a pellet gun and shooting them from the window. It won't happen, but I am thinking about it.
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