Funny Short Squirrel Story number one...

When my mother was growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin many years ago, my grandfather used to feed the squirrels on an outside window sill of their home in the wintertime.

The City of Milwaukee rests on the banks of Lake Michigan, one of the Great Lakes, and they would get substantial amounts of snow (called "lake effect") in the wintertime.

Many people would routinely take care of the birds furnishing them with seeds in feeders; hanging suet in the trees, etc., but my grandfather also thought about the cute little furry critters called squirrels.

My grandfather figured that their stored and buried nuts in the ground would be hard to find under all of that accumulated snow. Thus he began his habit of feeding them through a cracked open window of the house in the winter...placing the food on the windowsill outside.

A wooden pole was put into place that extended from a nearby tree to the window creating a path and his regular furry visitors liked this arrangement. The squirrels utilized this nicely provided route above the snowy ground to come and feast on the banquet provided by my amused grandfather.

This provided a source of entertainment for each of the family members inside of the warm and cozy home who also enjoyed watching the squirrels close up antics on the other side of the glass window.

There are few things cuter than watching a squirrel hold a piece of food in their tiny paws and rotate it as they chew. What starts out as a square soda cracker (as an example) soon becomes rounded as the squirrel keeps munching and rotating it until it is finally consumed. Those bright little eyes and swishing tails make for a great little action figure and those alert creatures are very quick in their reactions to stimuli of any kind.

One day while the window was still cracked open, one of the squirrels made his way into the house!

Frenetic activity ensued as everyone inside tried to chase the squirrel back outside amidst squeals of laughter and orders constantly changing as how best to accomplish that daunting task.

Their dog, Jiggs, was especially interested in the chase!

Some of you might have already read the hub about Jiggs. He was a great hunter and this was right up his alley!

More windows were opened and fortunately before anything was broken the surprised and frightened critter joined his counterparts back outside in his natural environment.

This only happened one time and strict measures were taken so that there was not an encore performance! Having been told about this occurrence more than once in my life, it must have been quite the commotion to have made such a lasting memory for my mother.

And don't forget...this was in the middle of the cold Wisconsin winters. Opening so many of their windows in order to offer more escape routes for the squirrel must have let much of that frigid air inside the house. Brrrrr!

Funny Short Squirrel Story number two...

Another true story that happened to my husband and me not many years ago...

Squirrels made their way into our attic and the first indication we had of it was noises inside the sheet-rock of a bedroom wall.

They were building a nest in that spot!

Making a long story short, after cutting two more holes than necessary in the sheet-rock to locate the nest and eradicate it, our friendly painter had more of a monumental repair than originally planned and we ended up having him paint the entire room after the sheet-rock repair.

More insulation had to be re-installed in the wall as the squirrels had pretty much shredded it and packed it down for their nice and cozy protected nesting site.

We found the nest, but not the squirrels! So we knew that they still had to be in the attic!

Naturally we could have called a pest control company and hired them to do the job, but we are animal lovers and called our local Wildlife Rehabilitation Center instead to see what they would prescribe to help us with our problem.

Here were their suggestions in no particular order:

#1...Distribute dog or cat feces up in our attic to dissuade the little critters from wanting to make a home there.

Well.......we do have some inside cats, Dusty and Peaches (who both have their own hubs, by-the-way!) but we really didn't like the thought of having their solid elimination tossed about in the insulation at random.  So we compromised!

As we cleaned the cat litter (we have the clumping type) we filled a couple of small paper bags with their feces and tossed them into the corners of the attic where we suspected the squirrels might have entered. We figured we could always more easily retrieve the bags later on after our problem was solved.  And hopefully the smell would make the squirrels think that there were cats up there?

When we moved to our new home we never remembered the bags filled with "goodies" in the attic until after the fact. Hope the new owner doesn't discover it someday thinking it is a great treasure. She will be heartily disappointed and probably wonder about our sanity. Ordinarily we kept a very clean house!

Suggestion #2...Have a strobe light continually operating in the attic.

This we tried!  They are not that easy to find BTW!  My husband finally located a store that sold strobe lights and purchased one. Most of the sales people in the store were young and tattooed sporting Mohawk haircuts or pink hair and had pins through their lips or earlobes...........but hey!, we needed to get rid of our squirrels.

Suffice it to say, my husband did not meet the standard dress or appearance of most of the other people in the store and the sales people are probably still poking fun at the old "fuddy duddy" who purchased that strobe light one day.

Did it work? Perhaps. The problem was the light burned out after about a day and a half of operation. 

The electrical cords that draped down from the attic and plugged in to our guest bathroom in order to operate the strobe light did not offer the most beautiful of visions.  We also got to thinking that since squirrels are rodents similar to mice but with more fur...we did not want to take the chance of one coming through that cracked stairwell going up into the attic and coming into the house.  So we gave up on the strobe light idea.

Suggestion #3...Play LOUD rock music in the attic.

Supposedly squirrels do not like that. Here is where we put our foot down and no longer complied. While it might have driven the squirrels crazy, it would SURELY have done that to us.

At the time we were season ticket holders to the Houston Symphony. Enough said!

Whatever the combination...cat poop, strobe light or just increased activity (plus the insecticide I sprayed up there..........that was my idea!) we seemed to rid our attic of squirrels and had our friendly painter put up some screening where our neighbor told us he had seen squirrels entering and exiting an air vent area.

So finally that problem was solved!

Cute as squirrels can be, we would rather keep them outside of our houses and attics. Hope you enjoyed these couple of short and funny and true squirrel stories.  Feel free to leave squirrel stories of your own in the comments section below.