Pesky varmints

When we visit a place for more than a couple of days we always put up a bird feeder. In the States this means a quick trip to Walmart on the first night to get a pole and a feeder, a sack of mixed feed and a hummingbird feeder with a bottle of sugar-water. We did this in Florida once and attracted a crane.

We had no success with the apparatus at Beaver Lake, any food scattered on the ground soon attracted sparrows and chipmunks. The sparrows were boring old house sparrows from Europe. At least, I thought they were, but one was a bit different. It crept about like a dunnock and had a longish tale. It even had a similar pattern to a dunnock, but it couldn't have been, and it wasn't. It was a female chipping sparrow.

The chipmunks were enchanting. They act like they are animated in a freeze-frame movie; either frozen still or streaking off in a blur. They often pogo across the floor on all four legs, bouncing like a cute rubber toy. There's one chipping outside the door right now. I left the bug-screen ajar and he came inside so I had to forcibly evict him several times. He's really miffed with me.

Yes they were enchanting, but they became more and more bold as the holiday wore on and now they don't respect us a tall. "Familiarity breeds contempt",  they say. We see them everywhere and they are always up to something. They are really good tree climbers, which reminds me that they are actually mini-squirrels. When I was cooking at the barbecue one evening, four of them had a noisy territorial dispute around my feet.

On moving to Maine I was hoping to attract a a much rarer squirrel to my feeder. On a previous visit we had caught a glimpse of a flying squirrel. I wanted a better view of these extremely shy and totally nocturnal animals so, on our first night here, we scattered liberal amounts of bird-food on the deck at dusk. Every now and then I popped out to look with my hunters' head torch that has a red LED lights.

Only a couple of hours after dark I was thrilled to catch a glimpse of one gliding down onto our bird feeder. They are small, like chipmunks, and clean white underneath so you see a white blur like someone has thrown a pice of paper across a darkened room.

After an hour we had six of them feeding confidently within arm's reach of us so we could see the folds in their soft grey fur and their beautiful, large black eyes. They remind me most of dormice, which are also nocturnal squirrels, not mice. At least they look like dormice; but they behave like chipmunks. Every night they raid the place and clean out all the seed. After two nights you can leave the lights on and have a party, they will still come.

Any seed that is left is taken by the grey squirrels in the morning. They soon demolished our feeding station and pulled the fake, yellow flowers off the hummer feeder so they could suck it dry. Then they bit a hole in the lid to get the last drop.

The hummingbird feeder was a big success. Here in the Maine Woods, nectar bearing flowers are far apart so Hummers range far and wide for food. We attracted one after only twenty minutes and she still keeps coming.

There's a Maine slideshow here.