Squirrels Raiding Your Feeders?

From National Wildlife Federation

For many Americans, Public Enemy Number One is a one-pound busybody with industrial strength teeth and a bushy tail: the gray squirrel.

© 2009 Donna L. Watkins - Squirrel in Falls Park, Greenville, SC
While killer bees and marauding bears occasionally capture headlines, the gray squirrel has been quietly disassembling the infrastructure in some of the nation's backyards, as well as vandalizing homes, sabotaging U.S. businesses and even occasionally assaulting innocent bystanders.

It is a prime suspect in half of all unsolved fires, an acknowledged perpetrator in most nonweather-related power failures and a wire chomper responsible for twice bringing stock trades on the NASDAQ to a halt.

Given these creatures' remarkable abilities and destructive power, it's no wonder many homeowners have gone to ridiculous lengths to try to outwit, outmaneuver and out-think the gray squirrels that plague their bird feeders. For some people, it's an all-out war.

Case in point: Ed and Jean LeRoy, who not long ago set up their first bird feeder on a post in their New Berlin, Wisconsin, backyard in the hopes of attracting beautiful songbirds. Their excitement was short-lived, however, when a gray squirrel completely emptied the feeder even before the first bird arrived.

By the second day, the couple was hosting a squirrel convention in their yard. On the third day, Ed LeRoy purchased a squirrel baffle to put on the pole below the bird feeder. Within five minutes, the crafty animals found that they could jump over the baffle and onto the feeder from a nearby tree limb. So LeRoy started cutting tree limbs. The squirrels then jumped from the tree trunk. In response, he cut down the tree. But the squirrels merely jumped to the feeder from another tree further away.

Exasperated, LeRoy was not about to give in to the creatures, ..... read the entire article.