The squirrels that hang around the outside of my lab are being well fed: peanuts and sunflower seeds daily. Yesterday I gave them a cut-up ear of corn, which puzzled them but seems to have completely disappeared by this morning. They’ve built a rudimentary “nest” of sticks, lined with leaves, that one of them appears to use as a bedroom, but I don’t think they’ll reproduce there.
At any rate, I filmed one well-fed squirrel nomming sunflower seeds this morning. They process them at an amazing rate: once this guy gets going, he eats 12 seeds in 37 seconds, or a rate of 3.08 seconds per seed. Let’s see you do that!
That’s nothing. I can eat 12 seeds in a single swallow!
Roast swallow with sunflower stuffing? A dozen seeds might indeed be all you could fit.
But, still. I’d think that there’re other birds both tastier and less likely to bring upon you the wrath of the Feds…interfering with native migratory birds is about as bit a no-no as you can get, and eating is about as much interference as there is….
b&
You’re talking about American swallows, Ben. The Feds don’t govern consumption of African or European swallows. Try them sometime in coconut sauce.
Red coconut curry or green coconut curry?
b&
With the swallow, always the red. I’m surprised you need to ask! 😉
My dad skewers an ear of corn on a long nail that’s been driven through a board. He then places the board on his deck where he can view it from his kitchen. This provides prime squirrel viewing, as the squirrels can’t take the corn away and have to eat it on the spot. Cuteness abounds.
When he gets tired of that, there are the advanced variants that abound on YT, like this one. One of these might prove amusing outside jac’s window.
But… you could have at least warned us about that accompanying, annoying song!
Oops, sorry, I’d already muted my speakers for something else and hadn’t turned them back on.
A friend/colleague has a red-bellied parrot that loves pepper (Capsicum sp seeds. The astonishing thing is how the bird perches on one leg, holds the hub (stem end + seeds) of the pepper in the claws of the other, and systematically, individually removes each seed, and shells it with its beak/tongue, extracting the minuscule amounts of endosperm inside. Whatever’s in there is apparently like crack to a parrot.
Maybe it’s a well-fed, pregnant squirrel?
They already have kids here in Alabama….
My dad was a great one for feeding the squirrels as we had 2 walnut trees on our property and he would save some of the yearly harvest in a big shopping bag. He started leaving 2 or 3 un-shelled walnuts on the picnic table outside our door and the little furry critters would come down and off with them within minutes. He started shelling the walnuts outside and the squirrels got used to lining up and feeding out of his hand. It got to be such a ritual that if he were late in showing up for “walnut brunch”, you’d eventually see a whiskered face about half way up the screen door peering in, looking for the walnut man.
Once you go nuts you will never look back. [/squirrel]
I have seen squirrels who ingested seeds faster than what you observed. But they did not eat the seeds. The seeds were packed in the back sides of the mouth. They can be taken home, buried somewhere, or eaten in peace later.
There is a wonderful little book called — roughly — “The Day No Pigs Would Die” about a little boy in Vermont during the depression. I’m sorry to have forgotten the author’s name. Anyway, his mother told him to gather some nuts for his birthday cake. His method — wait for a squirrel to pack its cheeks and then fire away with his rifle. I know it sounds cruel today. Maybe the desperately poor family ate the squirrel as well as the nuts.
Next thing you know, the squirrels will have TMJ from all the sunflower seeds. (They KILL my jaw!)
It’s a super-hero squirrel in training!
http://youtu.be/jg_ryIfz-zY
Ooops, sorry about the embedding….
Can you get some of the reflective film that allows you to see out but not the squirrels to see in?
I feed some unknown large number of squirrels. They come and go from all directions and frequently thunder across my roof (especially if they are chasing each other – squirrels don’t like squirrels). Most of them prefer peanuts in the shell. Sometimes they eat them on-site, sometimes they take them away. Sometimes they will get a fresh one, bury it, then dig up another to eat or take away. It is rather amusing to see a squirrel running along the top of a fence with a peanut sticking straight out of its mouth like a great swollen brown tongue. (Also amusing is the scalloped pattern they leave when there is fresh snow piled high on the fences – like yesterday.) If they work hard at it and the peanuts aren’t too big, they can manage to cram in two. I don’t try to feed them by hand, because I would prefer they maintain some fear of humans.
The magpies (which I feed Costco vulture chow) seem to be a bit afraid of the squirrels, which is somewhat surprising. I have heard of a red squirrel (much smaller than greys) biting the head off a grey jay (“whiskeyjack”) that dared to land on a flower box that the squirrel had laid claim to.
If you can get your hands o. A hedge apple this fall, I recommend cutting one of those up for them. The squirrels around here love them. I was able to get a squirrel to chase them down a hill in our park like a cat, which was hilariously adorable.