Minnesota Squirrel Watching: A Retirees Dream

I love to watch the squirrels in my yard. My husband and son like to eat them. I find the squirrels to be a gummy, chewy mass of meat.

I don't compare them to chicken. I preferred eating the meat cold after it sat in the refrigerator for a couple days. Even then, I was a little squeemish, knowing that I was eating something that was previously running across my yard. My husband laughingly referred to it as a tree rat, which added to my discomfort of even 'trying it'.

That is NOT my main focus in squirrel watching. I prefer to take pictures of them and watch them.

Although I did look up the nutritional information for you, dear reader, if you so choose to eat a squirrel.

Since I have umpteen million walnuts, I thought it would be cool to build a sawmill to slice them. I was raised around Minnesota in various locations and one location was Grand Marais, where my father worked for a sawmill. We lived across the Gunflint Trail from the mill and I was allowed to visit and see how the mill operated.

This was the inspiration for my own sawmill, plus I had a mother who was extremely interested in basket making and I saw firsthand the various methods of basket making.

The sawmill slices the walnuts and they are then ready for any type of craftwork that you can think to use them for.

These walnuts are one of the reasons I have forty plus squirrels. Well, the walnuts and the acorns play a large part... We have a lot of oak trees also.

I don't think so. My grandma, lived in Duluth, Minnesota for 92 years, and she put out peanuts and seed for them, plus her birds.

My neighbor was 101 when she passed away and she put out peanuts for squirrels on her porch. Now, we had a hole in our roof and the squirrel chose to crawl in there and put literally thousands of nuts in the space. Squirrels do that. They are cool like that. That's how they roll,

I'm not extremely upset about the walnuts, but I do have some stories about the truckload of nuts that my aunt and uncle dropped off last year. There were six boxes of nuts that they had raked up and since I was only working on the sawmill and didn't have it functioning, the nuts sat there through the winter.

Of course, the squirrels thought that was great. All these square hollow trees with nuts inside....

I'm sure THEY had stories to tell, too!

My dog will chase the squirrels across the yard and will sit for hours, either staring up into the tree or barking until I am quite sure that she is going to have a sore throat, if not, at least a little hoarse. But, still, again - day after day she assumes her duties in the yard, moving squirrels from tree to tree.

That's it!! She's not chasing squirrels. She's a control hound...

I'm sorry to have to break this to you, but just because you put out corn, you may not get any squirrels. I know. I know. It's a hard fact to have to fathom, but it's true and I'm sorry to hurt you.