Squirrel Shenanigans

I’m interrupting my story about our new wall and gate (which I know must be killing my Mom since she’s dying to see photos – sorry Mom!) to wish everyone a Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

As many of you know, we have dozens of banana trees in our yard. We continue to cut bunches down but mostly the bunches of bananas on our trees tend to be too heavy for the trees and eventually the entire bunch falls or the tree tumbles (we’re talking at least 50 bananas per bunch). This tends to happen before the bananas are ripe so we have taken to leaving the unripe bananas under our car port to ripen. We hose down the bunch to ensure there are no spiders then cut the large bunch into smaller bunches of 5 or 6 bananas.

Several times we have been overwhelmed with too many ripe bananas at once so I would leave some out for the birds to enjoy. Eventually, the squirrels noticed all the bananas sitting around under the car port ready for the taking. We would wake in the morning to find an entire bunch of five or six bananas missing! At first we found this hilarious but as our banana supply would dwindle we decided we should hang some from the car port to keep the squirrels out. Besides, it’s not like we’re starving the squirrels since I watch them eat green bananas right from the tree all day long. They don’t really need to take our ripe bananas too!

Of course, being squirrels, they can’t be satisfied until they eat everything. In other words, the squirrels have figured out how to get into the hanging bags of bananas under the car port. Patrick and I have observed all their acrobatics from hanging upside down and grabbing from the top of the bag to jumping from a cross beam onto the bag in order to rip it and enjoy the entire bag’s contents!

Even though the squirrels can very entertaining - one day they even employed a diversion tactic! I watched one squirrel jump around from branch to branch while another swooped in from the other direction to jump at the bag of bananas! – I find I must often scare them to discourage them from eating my “special hoard”.

Darn squirrels! They have even started to fight back! One day they dropped an orange on Patrick’s head when he walked under a tree. Saturday they pelted the roof of the carport with pits from some unknown fruit. Patrick said next they’ll learn to use tools and then we’re really in trouble!