Going Squirrelly

I've been spending most days by myself.  JDB is an essential employee who works for a hospital, so he's either there or at the lab during the week.  I generally spend my days working in front of the large bay windows in the living room.  Sometimes, there are cats sleeping in various places around me and sometime in the late morning, I turn on the TV just for the noise (and the heat the TV produces, but this chilly house is a story for another time).

I have two bird feeders and a suet feeder outside these windows and I can pretty much watch the comings and goings of many feathered
friends.  The most common visitors are downy and red-bellied
woodpeckers, tufted titmice (titmouses?), chickadees, finches, cardinals, juncos, house wrens, and the occasional blue jay.

It is marvelous; I find birds to be immensely fascinating.

Not everyone who comes up on the porch is feathered, however, and the other visitors are fascinating, too, though not for the same reasons. 

I want to talk about squirrels.

Much of the time, they seemed okay with just eating what had fallen onto the mat under the feeder; but, increasingly, they kept trying to get onto the one birdfeeder and so we hung a large windchime in between the porch upright and the feeder.  Not to be dissuaded, they would jump on top of it and then look around panicked when it began to make SO MUCH NOISE and spin around on them.  Occasionally, they would still manage to get over to the feeder, and I kind of had to give it to them at that point, honestly.

But I did get them some of their own food in the hopes of keeping them from feeling quite so captivated by the feeder.  So, far it seems to be working, and has provided it's own sort of entertainment, to boot.  To watch them try to sit on the corn and eat from it without it spinning them off is...well, I don't know.  But it is fun.  And the thing that is best about them?

No matter how silly they look or how many times they are defeated, they keep trying.