It’s hard for me to believe, but we have several ignorant squirrels in our back yard. A couple of weeks ago I found two large ears of field corn lying in the street. I brought them home, removed the husks, and placed them on the table on the patio, which is directly beneath the trees where the squirrels hang out. Here it is two weeks later and the squirrels haven’t eaten any of the corn. I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t know what corn is (never seen it before), or else we have some mighty dumb squirrels. I go out in the back yard and point to the corn (yum, yum), but the squirrels ignore me. I’m guessing that they don’t understand English very well, either.
A-maize-ing.
The smartest squirrels I know live in Mossflower Woods, and speak English quite well. Mossflower Woods is not in the midwest USA. Sounds like you got some Gawtrybe around yer place. Of course somebody else will probably just tell ya some corny jokes about these squirrels, I’m just trying to be informative.
The purpose of squirrels is to torment dogs. Maybe they think you’re a dog Doug. Dog, Doug. Close spelling.
Here is Lucky keeping an eye out for her tormenters.
Our current dogs try to share their balls with the squirrels, our youngest also tries to get the cats to chase balls she spits out in front of them. The cats hate squirrels they make nasty noises when they see them, of course cats would kill everything if they thought they could get away with it. Have you thought about naming these squirrels? How’s Cornelius and Cornwallis?
I grew up in a house in a woods, which was next to a cornfield (no fence). Let me tell you that the squirrels in that woods knew what corn was for. After corn picking time the squirrels would go out into the field looking for ears of corn that were missed. So did I, although the modern harvesting machines leave very few whole ears of corn like the old corn pickers. At least, the squirrels in my present yard in the city are not completely non-industrious. They know where the walnut tree is (five houses down and across the street). I see them coming back home, walking on the high voltage electrical wires, with a walnut in their mouth. I’ve learned the hard way that it is a mistake to put peat and loose dirt around new plants, because that is just the place that the squirrel is going to bury that walnut. My once-thriving blueberry plant looks like it might not make it through the winter due to all of the digging around its roots.
so, you’ve got squirrel nut blueberries, eh?
Freddi doesn’t like to bother with squirrels. She decided long ago they don’t play fair, what with the tree-climbing and all. She always has her eyes sharply peeled for rabbits though. Now there’s some excitement.
I have had 2 different cats which did occasionally catch squirrels. Quite a take-down to witness.
They think you’re the mad maize-poisoner.
I love squirrel corn, and bleeding heart…
Maybe the squirrels are smarter than I give them credit for. I read about hogs that wouldn’t touch the Round-up ready corn but torn down the fence to eat the non-GMO (genetically modified organism) hybrids. In any case, there isn’t going to be any “show and tell” for squirrels day in my backyard. When I take the table into the garage for the winter, the corn goes on the ground, where I am fairly confident it will disappear quickly.
Update on my squirrels: they have taken over the four large pots half-full of dirt that I decided to leave out this winter. From the house all I can see is their tails sticking up above the top of the pots, as the squirrels are busy digging and burying nuts. I decided to give the squirrels a better chance at the corn, so I put the ears of corn in two of the large pots, thinking that if the squirrels got close to the corn, they would surely recognize it as food. Not so. When I walked out to the patio today, I could see that both ears of corn had been thrown out of the pots. The squirrels evidently didn’t want any of that trash in “their” pots.
Can a squirrell lift an entire ear of corn? I’d be inclined to blame a raccoon. Is it possible that the ears you found had been treated in some way to render them unattractive to animals? I can’t imagine why, except perhaps to make a harvest-theme wreath or decoration that could be hung outside.
Simon, it is a mystery to me, too. I grew up in a woods full of squirrels, and I never saw one that wouldn’t go after an ear of corn. I don’t know whether squirrels need to learn what is food and what isn’t or whether that is solely instinct. The ears of corn that I mentioned were not obviously sprayed or treated in any way that I can detect. They don’t smell odd, and when I found them, the ears were completely enclosed in the husk. It is possible that this is GMO corn, and I mentioned this in an earlier post. The large chemical companies, like Monsanto, that makes Roundup Herbicide, is selling Roundup-ready corn seed that has been genetically modified so that the corn plants will be resistant to Roundup. The squirrels may be detecting something in this corn that is different, and their red flags of avoidance are being raised. We poor humans have lost much of this sensitivity, so we eat the GMO corn with gusto. Don’t try to sell any of it to Europe, though. They won’t buy it, just like the pigs and squirrels.
Maybe these squirrels are on a low carb diet and prefer corned beef to corn? Or roadkill to sunflower seed, bird eggs to peanuts, neighboring squirrel’s kiddies to acorns, they have to get Creutzfeldt-Jakob from somewheres.