On the drive home today, the talk show hosts on the radio were discussing squirrels.  Their conversation brought back memories and made me laugh.  One of them witnessed an aggressive squirrel chasing a crow round and round a tree.  The crow had grabbed food from the squirrel and was not about to give it back.  The radio host described how the crow eventually flew up into a tree and the squirrel followed it.

The conversation lead to talk of feeding the squirrel.  This in turn encouraged people to call and text into the show with their squirrel horror stories.  On fellow spoke of a squirrel getting into the cabin of his boat.  The boat owner filled 10 garbage bags with pine cones.  This conversation brought back memories of my own.

A squirrel got into my garage.  It chewed through the wood floor and got up into the attic.  When I contacted the county pest control department, they told me that I had to get rid of their food store.  This meant that I had to crawl into the attic.

I found a large 'ball' of chewed up pink insulation.  In the middle of the ball was a winter's worth of dried mushrooms, peanuts, sunflower seeds and whatever else that little rodent could haul up there.  I filled 4 large garbage bags full of insulation bits.  That did the trick.  It did not return.

For days after that, I found more stores in the garage.  There were dried mushrooms in the bindings of my snowshoes and behind the wreath hanging on the wall.  The birdhouse hanging on the exterior wall was full of mushrooms.

The squirrels in the backyard are entertaining to watch but can be very destructive.