Live from Austin!

On Sunday, I was sitting in the living room when one of our female squirrels came to the back door and tapped on the glass to ask for food.

Entirely too cute, so by way of balance here’s a cockroach story:

This morning rothko found a cockroach in her shoulder bag. So of course, she immediately said "Eww! Roach!" and tipped it out onto the living room floor, at which point it retreated to under the sofa. I decided I might be able to get it, but I’d only have a single chance, so I fetched the Dyson. Sure enough, when I moved the sofa it scuttled towards the exercise machine, but the vacuum did the job. My intention had been to release the insect outside, but it turns out that a 1000km/h cyclone leads to incipient cockroach moribundity.

At this time of year they mostly creep in under the front door in search of water. Three this year, which seems to be about the usual number.

Update: I spoke too soon. This evening I noticed Chester staring intently at something in the bottom of his cage…

Threadless.com are having a sale again. And they have another squirrel T-shirt. They know me too well.

They also have the shirt I’m wearing at the moment in stock and on sale:

I realized that I hadn’t spent enough quality time watching squirrels recently. Black Tip would sit on the fence and wait for me to put food out, but we haven’t seen him in a while, and the new youngsters are shy.

On Sunday I was idly browsing the tool store when I saw they had a special on wireless motion sensor alarms, the kind you can mount on your driveway and hear a beep when someone approaches the house. I figured I’d risk $12 to see if one could detect a squirrel. Cheap Chinese-made crap, but it’s not for actual security use, so who cares?

Opening up the box revealed an infra-red sensor and transmitter unit, and a receiver with some apparently superfluous LEDs, both battery powered. The “chime” is a harsh beep, and I’m not sure how much I’d trust the claim of a 400′ range, but for this application it’s fine.

The sensor/transmitter is now on the rat mat, and the receiver is in the living room. When a squirrel approaches to chow, the receiver beeps and we can walk to the back door to watch. Since there’s no sound from the sensor, the squirrel doesn’t get frightened off. As far as they know, we’re just spending a lot more time at the back of the house.

I’m now wondering how hard it would be to get it hooked up to trigger a camera…

It’s National Squirrel Awareness Week!

Quote:

According to IRNA, the official Islamic Republic news agency, the national Police chief has implicitly verified the news about the confiscation of a number of squirrels, equipped with eavesdropping devices, on the Iranian borders. He has declined to give any more details, but, reportedly, when asked about the confiscation of 14 spy squirrels, he stated, “I have heard about it, but I do not have precise information”. IRNA adds, “These squirrels were equipped by foreign intelligence services, but were captured two weeks ago by the Police”.

Life imitates Flickr?

It has taken a long time and lots of nuts, but today it finally happened: our local alpha squirrel, Black Tip, took a peanut out of my fingers.

I’m wondering if the other squirrels watching him have the intellectual capacity to reason that they can do it too, or whether I’ll need to train them separately.

We now have 3 female squirrels visiting us who are either pregnant or nursing. Today one was feeding when a second turned up with two young squirrels in tow. The latecomer was chased off, and the youngsters proceeded to spend most of the rest of the afternoon playing in the treetops.

I seem to have started an interspecies conflict, however. One of the doves has worked out that there’s often sunflower seed to be had on the rear deck. On Friday I saw a squirrel being chased along the fence by an angry dove.

I’m going to have to come up with some kind of seed dispenser that’s dove-proof but not squirrel-proof. Maybe a plastic container with some smallish holes in, attached to the mat with some wire.

Buster has also returned. I’m going to try to get a good photo.

On Friday, I was gazing out into the back yard when I saw a hawk swoop towards the house, turn to the side at the last moment, and try to grab a squirrel from the fence.

I’m glad to report that he failed, but the squirrel was clearly very disturbed by his near death encounter. He leapt onto the trunk of the nearest tree, and called out—a type of sound I hadn’t heard from a squirrel before. It was a kind of squeak, starting low in pitch and going higher. I’m assuming it’s squirrel for “Holy crap, guys, look out, there’s a bird of prey around!”

I’m not sure why Google video always seems to hose the first few seconds of the video.

We’ve been out getting the food for Christmas. The supermarket sells corn for squirrels—it even has a picture of a squirrel on the bag. I also picked up a big $3 bag of sunflower seeds, it’ll be their Christmas gift. The man standing behind us in the checkout queue was a squirrel skeptic. “You’re feeding rats!”

We got a fake tree this year, after Mythbusters covered how much damage a tree can do if it catches on fire and rothko decided she didn’t want a real tree in the house after all. Safety aside, there’s something to be said for not having needles everywhere, and having branches strong enough to hold up weightier ornaments. You can get Christmas tree smell as scented candles, and probably as an aerosol too.

The big excitement, though, is that we managed to get some mince pies this year. I don’t think I’d seen any since we visited my family for Christmas several years ago.

No Wii for Christmas. I tried stores, I tried online, no luck. I even tried the Amazon customers vote, which said I had a slightly better chance of winning the chance to buy a Wii than I had of getting hemorrhoids, which kinda makes me feel better that that sort of probability is by no means a sure thing.