Profligates in the front yard
A nutty problem
One of the things I love about our home is how verdant everything is around it. We live in an older neighborhood, and along with large plot sizes (we’re on almost an acre), there are plenty of old trees. Most of our neighbors have gigantic pines, but the family who built our house back in 1968 planted three pecan trees out front. The husband had grown up with pecans in Oklahoma and wanted a taste of home. There are plenty of other trees around our yard, too—a large Japanese magnolia (my favorite), a live oak, some crepe myrtles—those are just the ones in the front. Out back there are three oaks (one absolutely gigantic), a Southern magnolia, a redbud, and some other random trees, one of which I still haven’t identified.
The pecans and magnolia give welcome shade to the front yard, and when we moved in we had visions of harvesting our own pecans. The first fall we were here, we managed to collect quite a few…and then had to figure out how to get them shelled. Unfortunately the majority of them were inedible. The husband who had planted the trees had died some years before we bought the house from his widow, and the trees hadn’t been fed and cared for for years. Kraig went to work feeding them, but that first fall proved to be the last nut haul we made.
Why? One word. Squirrels.
Sure they’re cute and all, when they go dashing about the yard, chasing each other up and down the trees, lying along the branches in hot mid-summer, stretching out to take a sip from the birdbath, scouting out fallen seeds from the bird feeder then sitting up to nibble away at them. They’re even cute when they take a pecan and bury it in the ground. The problem is, they’re innumerable. They just keep coming. They also thrash the tree branches, breaking the thin ones as they dash along them, snatching nuts. And that’s the worst of it all. They snatch all the nuts, and they snatch them before they’re ripe. Around here, the pecans aren’t fully ripe until October. This year, I think the nuts are already stripped from the trees. Worse, this year the squirrels have been particularly destructive. For a few weeks it seemed every time we walked outside the garage or on the path from the house, we navigated a carpet of crunching shells of pecans that the squirrels had sampled and cast down. I kept sweeping the walk, fearing some visitor approaching our house would stumble on the mess and break and ankle. From our front window we could almost see the squirrels take a nut, take a bite, then hurl the remainder to the ground.
How do you reason with that? I grew up with all of the stories and documentaries of animals storing up food for the winter. The stories lean into the efficiency of it all, and how amazing it is. Now and then one of the tales talks about the nut cache that a critter forgot about or lost, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a story where the beasts were downright wasteful and destructive! The squirrels’ wanton behavior seems to be more of an effect of the Fall than an example of the beauty and efficiency of nature. It also makes me wonder how in the world farmers who have nut groves make sure their trees aren’t denuded before the harvest! Granted, I know there are measures to get rid of the animals, but there are only so many one can eliminate. More keep coming as the word goes around: “Free nuts! Come and get ‘em!”
So for this year at least we don’t have a solution. The nuts are gone. I no longer have to sweep our path every day, and we’re back to a handful of squirrels that our chiweenie unsuccessfully tries to chase down. And I’m left to wonder how this behavior fits into God’s design. Somebody’s got to wonder. The squirrels sure don’t care.
Art for the week
Ev created this during Inktober back in 2021. I pulled it out last week and added it to the front of a birthday card for a friend who just turned fifty. I love the way this squirrel is leaping off into the unknown, yet it has complete certainty that it will land well. This seemed completely appropriate for my friend. I just wish our squirrels had more sense when it came to pecans.
Check out Daughter of Arden at Bandersnatchbooks.com, along with other great titles.
You can find links to more of my writing at A Shaft of Sun Through the Rain and my old blog, Willing, Wanting, Waiting.
We have squirrel friends named Annie and Billy. They were named after a Nature special. I don’t have any fruit trees, but they do raid the bird feeders. I gave up on trying to keep them away so I bought them a picnic table and dried corn cobs. Your daughter’s picture is amazing. She captured the movement perfectly.
What a nutty story!