Squirrels: Two Funny Cute and Short Stories
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 windowsill 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 extending from a nearby tree to the window created 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 supplied by my amused grandfather.
This spectacle 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.
My grandfather made it easier than this for the squirrels!
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 as a square soda cracker as an example soon becomes rounded and finally disappears as the squirrel keeps munching and turning it.
Those bright little eyes and swishing tails make for a great action figure, and those alert creatures are swift 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 continually changing as to how best accomplish that daunting task.
Their dog, Jiggs, was especially interested in the chase! Some of you might have already read my post 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.
A squirrel in the house only happened one time, and strict measures ensued so that there was never an encore performance!
I heard this story more than once in my life from my mother, and it must have been quite the commotion to have made such a lasting memory.
Opening so many of their windows to offer more escape routes for the squirrel must have let much of that frigid air inside the house. Brrrrr!
Story Number Two
Another true story 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 noise 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 significant repair than initially planned, and we ended up having him paint the entire room after the sheetrock repair.
More insulation had to be reinstalled in the wall as the squirrels had pretty much shredded it and packed it down for their excellent 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.
- Suggestion #1: Distribute dog or cat feces up in our attic to dissuade the little critters from wanting to make a home there.
We do have some inside cats, Dusty and Peaches but we didn't like the thought of having their feces 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 an immaculate house!
- Suggestion #2: Have a strobe light continually operating in the attic.
We decided to try this suggestion. They are not that easy to find by the way! 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 salespeople are probably still poking fun at the old "fuddy-duddy" who purchased the strobe light that day.
Did it work? Perhaps. The problem was the light burned out after about a day and a half of operation. So it was not the greatest of tests.
The electrical cords that draped down from the attic and plugged into our guest bathroom 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.
Had we purchased this kind of strobe light it would have lasted longer! Live and learn, as they say!
- Suggestion #3: Play LOUD rock music in the attic.
Supposedly squirrels do not like that. Here is where we put our foot down. 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 which was my idea!) we seemed to rid our attic of squirrels. We then 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!
Squirrel
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.
This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.
© 2009 Peggy Woods
Comments are welcomed.
know the feeling and experience.
cute, thats cool that a cat took in three bay squirrels as her own babies.
Love these stories. Sharing them again. Spring will soon be here, and on chilly days like this I look forward to it. Hope you are well and that your website is coming along well.
Squrrels are fun to watch. Your story is really funny. What might have happened to that treasure in the attic? HaHaHa
I used to feed the squirrels along with the birds back when I lived in a house and could do that. Our squirrels were spoiled badly, but they were so entertaining to watch, and one of them was always under foot when I went out to refill feeders and change the water.
One afternoon when I got home from work I was informed that a squirrel had come through the patio door when it was opened briefly and was still in the house. We had one squirrel that would stand against the patio door and bang on it when the available food got too low. It was probably her that slipped in.
The squirrel's hiding place was known, but it wasn't possible to get to it, and we didn't want to force it deeper into the house. Currently it was still in the living room where it first came in.
I told husband to call animal control and they showed up fairly quick. They had a strange rectangular flattish cage on the end of a long poll for catching the squirrel. The cage could be opened and closed through a mechanism on the end of the poll opposite the cage.
The animal catcher caught the squirrel very quickly. I have never heard a squirrel literally scream like that poor squirrel apprehended in our living room did that day. I felt so sorry for her because she was so afraid. The catcher person was willing to take the squirrel away where it would be let loose somewhere far away, but this was her home. I didn't want her taken away, just out of our house, so the catcher turned her loose away from the door, but back in our yard.
You may not think so, but animals communicate and they all knew how I let the squirrel loose, and how on other times I would carefully scoop up unconscious birds that would fly into our patio door and knock themselves out and then lye in danger of being gotten by the neighbor's cat on the patio.
If I knew a bird was there unconscious on the patio, I would go out and scoop it up and lay it on the roof of one of our vehicles where it could 'wake up' more safely. The cat could still get up on top of the car, but it would be a little more work than when the bird was lying on the ground. I would keep my eye on it too. They normally woke up and flew away in less than 5 minutes. All the birds would be sitting in the trees overhead watching this and they knew I was watching over the injured bird.
Squirrels and birds are so fun to watch. Enjoyed your little stories. Voted up and BAUI, sharing with followers.
No, we don't need any more rain here. We normally get about 36 inches a year and so far this year we have received 43 inches. :)
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Haha funny stores here! I really like these animals, good to see other people like them as much as me as well :)
Hi Peggy! My gym is situated in the middle of a big park and there are squirrels and squirrels everywhere which makes my early morning sojourn heavenly and so I got connected to your squirrel story instantly with all my fondness for these little creatures.
I love this hub! Such funny stories. I laughed out loud at the thought of your goody bags full of cat crap strewn about the attic. Squirrels moved out because they thought you all were nuts, haha. The videos were wonderful additions. I liked them both. That little black kitten really is exercising restraint, bless his heart. Voted up, funny, and sharing.
Peggy, I thoroughly enjoyed (and identified with) these squirrel stories! I have been feeding the squirrels in a different part of the yard, hoping they would leave the bird feeders alone. That is not the case, however. Being the bottomless pits that they are, squirrels continue to find their way around all my baffles and deterrents despite my best efforts.
In fact, I have one squirrel that does a standing straight-up jump to over 6 feet off the ground onto a feeder. I am in such awe of the acrobatics I can't bear to chase it away!
I love it when they relax head down on a tree and then stretch and yawn; one front leg goes out straight and then the other. Comical little dudes, aren't they?! Thank you for telling me about this article. It was a joy to read. Voted Up, Funny and Interesting and Shared
Pearl
Well, when I had my squirrels, I had no cat or dog, so #1 wasn't possible...I wonder what the neighbors would have thought with strobe lights or loud music coming from an empty house...lol. Glad you were able to solve your squirrel problem. Goes to show there are more ways than one to scare them away! Thanks for directing me here! :) I enjoyed your stories!
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Peggy W...o my...squirrels are fun and funny critters. They are very smart too and figure out so many ways around our clever contraptions to keep the from food. Here in Florida they really do not suffer from a lack of food year round. When I supply my bird feeders with seed, I can hear the call echo throughout neighboring yards...'hey, look...she has put out the buffet again!!! Meet you in her yard in 5 minutes!!!' thanks for sharing this....
Nice stories! Squirrels are really cute. In my country, squirrels look quite different from their foreign counterparts- Indian squirrels are sort of caramel-coloured with long double darkish-brown lines on their backs and have not-so-bushy tails that lie, touching the ground. They are awfully scared of people and if you approach them even quite far, they run off at their fastest!
When I was a kid, like you said we prefer squirrels ouside, in my grandma's house, suddenly it was overran with so many squirrels. However, my granny asked the strong watchman and the brave cook to catch them one by one in a big bag(we closed the room where the large number of squirrels dominated this room) and took them out to a far away place and set all of them free.
Thank u for Sharing. Funny and interesting. Vote up.
I have the same exact problem with the squirrels at my house. They have moved into my attic as well. They are often times heard in the wee hours of the morning scurryng about. I think i'm going to try the rock and roll music to get them out!
Hehehe!!!
Oh by the way, I loved the squirrel in "Mission Impossible" so funny! And the video of the cat that adopted the baby squirrels is just adorable!!
Peggy -- Oh my, such a funny hub!
I have never seen so many squirrels as when I lived in the States. I remember I was so surprised seeing them everywhere! And they could be quite a nuisance.
In Sweden we have squirrels in the forest, but it's rare that we see them.
When I was a kid, playing in the forest, I found a squirrel with a broken leg. I brought him home and mended the leg. He recovered but decided to stay in the family. He used to sit on my shoulder and nibble on my earlobe. He never did harm or destroy anything. He had the opportunity to take of in to the forest any time, but he never did until one day, when a pretty little squirrel came to visit, and a few days later they both disappeared into the forest. I never got to see my friend again.
Your story reminded me of my dear squirrel friend.
Voted up and pushed all the right buttons.
Thank you!
I LOVE to watch the squirrels their funny at times...
I absolutely LOVE squirrels, and the kind heart of your grandfather to create such a way for them to feed in the cold wintertime :) Wonderful hub! Voted WAY UP!!!
Funny hub Peggy W! We had squirrels in our attic (no I'm not referring to our being insane, although that may be a possibility) and they chewed through our telephone line. Luckily my wife had that phone line insurance that we had never used in 20 years. It didn't cost us a dime.
Very true such a device will be something you can feed generations for - sadly nothing ahs worked so far!
Squirrels are indeed playful but I still can't get them to stop eating the bird food !
Squirrels always look so cute and innocent but......
Yeah my son says he has been going in the neighbors tree, A larger tree and I think that is a great sign, although my son don't like that, But it's like I told him maybe we can see about getting him a genie pig and he cheered up at that thought.
Yeah I live with mom and she's getting afraid of him now, was just talking to me about it again.
He gets happy and excited like any animal to see you in the morning etc, but yeah he's a squirrel so he's twice as fast and can run up you and that is just freaking her out too much. : (
Haven't seen any fleas on him yet, it would be kind of easy to tell too since my son decided to give him a hair cut, lol! Wow, wonder if they have squirrel flea collars?
I read it was illegal to hold a squirrel for more than 48 hours too late though, gawd I don't wanna go to jail for giving a darn, what back @sswards world we live in.
He is still on the smallish side so maybe why he's not wandering too much yet, I need to do some research.
Hello Peggy : ) Well my sons friend brought him over then my son hid him on the front porch - real lucky I found him I mean it was hot on that porch and he was weak just barely old enough to eat.
But he's gotten bigger now and is great, You have to make sure to give them more then nuts they need a variety.
He's like any cat no kidding he plays, he sleeps on me yet knows his box too and just puts himself to bed.
We kiss him and he is so adorable sociable loves contact- But I am trying to really get him to be outdoors much more as he is a squirrel but I do fear he is too tamed maybe I can't know yet.
He is packing nuts in the crevices of the furniture sometimes now too, just too darn funny.
Yes I need to get some pics especially when he is sleeping on his back with his feet in the air that is the cutest.
I have a pet squirrel right now, was brought over by my sons friend. He is so lovable more than cats I have known actually. I need to take a pic when he sleeping by the computer mouse seriously would be a great shot.
Oh my, squirrels and bird feeders. God has to have a sense of humor. I have never seen an animal so determined to get food as a squirrel when trying to raid a bird feeder! They are very smart, but sure are a pain when they jump for the feeder and dump most of the stuff out when they miss! LOL
Never had one in the house, but did have a possum once...they are mean!!!
Fascinating squirrel tales narrative.
Peggy, there is nothing cuter than watching the squirrels eat. They seem to have their own method. I bet that squirrel that got in led everybody on a merry chase. It made me laugh just thinking about it.
You're getting around- you beautiful soul! God bless you Peggy! I may do my "squirrel dance" on your buttons!
Hi Peggy,
These squirrel stories were sweet, wonderful and funny! I was laughing out loud throughout most of story #2.
Thanks for a very entertaining and delightful read.
Loved every squirrel of it, a great hub and prophetic video and music
Great stories - a squirrel in the house would be a nightmare! The cat faces one is new to me and funny that you left it there - oops :) The strobe light gives me visions of disco dancing squirrels - like the gophers in Caddyshack :)
Peggy these little things look cute, but they are very clever and their reactions are real quick.
I love squirrels Peggy! Thank you for this squirrel hub. I've "hooked" you up to mine. You have so many "treasures" here!
Peggy - How funny. It seems the true stories are always better than anything anyone could concoct. Thanks for sharing!
Great stories. Squirrels are cute......Nice hub
I remeber when I was a kid in Northeast Minneapolis there was, for reasons I don't know, an overpopulation of squirrels.Once when we were eating lunch the squirrel actually started chewing on the screen door. I figure they were trying to get in. They were tame that year and I recall feeding some by hand, which seems foolish now.
You might enjoy Ray Stevens "Mississippi Squirrel Revival" video, although it is still funny in the song without video.
When I was growing up in my village home, I had a hobby to get them in my cage as many as possible. I played with them. at last I freed them. once one of them bit my finger and it started bleeding yet I'm carrying that mark on my finger. thanks for writing on squirrel.
Peggy W, how entertaining. It is heartening that so many people care for wild life and rather than destroy, will try and find ways to live as neighbors (separating sleeping arrangements). The squirrels are so entertaining and my husband will be relieved that they are not living in our immediate environment, otherwise they might have been welcomed as houseguests. Looking forward to many more of your entertaining animal stories.
My fat squirrel story was at:
https://hubpages.com/entertainment/Quick-Hit-Novem
But thanks for looking at the others!
I liked your stories about squirrels. I had written one about how fat the squirrels get in Wisconsin in winter and how my dog comes closer and closer to getting a bite on one in my nov 20 quick hit hub but it hasn't rec'd a very good score. I don't think people like all the picking on how fat the squirrels are getting. It could be PETA related.
Peggy, this is cute (and funny). My friend woke up to find a squirrel in her kitchen, trying to get into the cookie jar on the counter. (Creepy, and yet kind of funny too.) I wished I had a camera when I once saw a squirrel carrying a whole, pink-frosted, doughnut (with sprinkles) across the street. Somehow squirrels and pink frosting just seems "off". :)
Great stories.
Very cute stories. My squirrel story is not so pleasant so I won't ruin your hub with the particulars. Unfortunately two little squirrels came in through an open chimney hatch and couldn't get out of our vacation home. Not sure how long they were inside but they did try tirelessly by chewing around the wooden window frames. We found them probably weeks later.
Great fun stories! And Grandpa is to be complimented on his ingenuity to help feed the squirrels.
My daughter found a squirrel in her back bedroom after investigating strange sounds for a couple of days. It had squeezed inside from a loose ceiling tile. At first,seeing it hiding under a bed, she thought of 'monster', unnamed. Quite a story too, but had a happy squirrel ending.
Thanks for sharing your fun too!
Dog feces in the attic! :-)
This is so damn cute! i love Squirrels :)
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