Reader Barn Owl kindly sent me a big bag of pecans to give to my squirrels, and I’ve started them in on the good stuff. They learned quickly that a pecan is infinitely superior to a sunflower seed or even a peanut, and I have to ration them carefully.
Here’s one about to grab his very first pecan from my hand:
With squirrels having vision, make sure your thumb isn’t too close as I’m sure a human thumb could easily be misunderstood to be a pecan to a myopic squirrel.
And squirrels are myopic, I’ve observed that while feeding them peanuts. It appears that a squirrel can see a peanut when I’m holding it, but when I toss it and it lands right next to the squirrel, it has to sniff around to find it.
Mmmmmm, pecans. Squirrels have good taste.
My wife made 3 types of pies when family visited recently. One was a chocolate, bourbon, pecan pie. It was reallllly good!
I think her cherry pie is still the best though. And this time I didn’t even have to pit the cherries. I was too busy doing all of the other cooking.
I miss having friendly squirrels but my cats have made them shy of the house. On the other hand I have several friendly racoons, one is a huge male that has been around for going on three years and has no hesitation from coming right up to me to ‘beg’ for food.
Pecans are outstanding. The Squirrel probably has better nutritional sense than most humans.
People don’t seem to spend time collecting wild pecans these days; maybe the shelled ones are inexpensive enough that no one wants to bother. The larger pecan trees are on either side the road to the ranch where I board my horse, and I haven’t even begun to search under those. Apparently my only competition is the ranch squirrels, and there are more pecans than they can possibly eat or stash.
Analogous to a kid’s first ice cream cone.
I live in a mobile home / RV resort park. One side is moblie homes the other side is RVs. The RV side has large empty patches in the summer. An older man use to take tubs of peanuts on his golf cart to the empty sections and sit there. Squirrels would chase him till he stopped. They would climb all over his cart and eat both from the tub and any place he would dumb handfuls. He would have them all over him. sitting next to him, basically on all surfaces. It was so cool to watch this old man sit there and the squirrels hanging out with him. Hugs