You may have seen me in my yard lately, walking around with my head down. I'm usually carrying a bucket of some sort and looking very intense. I'm not praying, I'm plotting strategy. That's because I'm at war with The Squirrel Nation.
It was never my intent to take on the entire squirrel population single-handedly. In fact, up until a few years ago, I thought of squirrels as harmless little creatures that made for good cartoons. That was before I learned the truth about the evil Squirrel Empire.
Our house has a huge attic. It has to be big because it has to hold a couple of hundred squirrels at any given time. When we bought our home, we liked having the extra space. I just wish we had known about the Squirrel Resort Hotel.
We first realized we had tenants on Christmas day of 1993. Early that morning, we heard a rustling sound from above. "Tiny reindeer," I sleepily whispered to my wife. But after a few minutes of what sounded like a miniature barroom brawl, we realized that we were under invasion. We've been losing the war ever since.
Over time, I tried everything to rid us of our unwanted guests. My first approach was to scatter around a box of mothballs based on the suggestion that squirrels can't stand the smell. When the first box didn't work, I figured I just needed a few more to do the trick so I unloaded a fifty-pound bag in the attic. The squirrels were delighted with my generosity. Instead of leaving, they formed soccer leagues.
For my next approach, I bought a BB gun. That night, when the party kicked in, I launched an attack. In the process, I learned that crashing around a dark attic in your boxer shorts is not in the Delta Force training manual. Besides that, BBs tend to ricochet in amazing ways in an attic, and I ended up beating a hasty retreat.
After that came the utterly useless Sonic Pest Control Noise Emitter. It made a sonic sound alright â
Monday
August 4th, 2025
10:27AM
