Nuisance du Jour

When D first bought our house, he did a lot of work to the landscaping, giving it significantly more curb appeal. He took out trees, removed a chain link fence, put in flower beds, and more. One of the trees that the removal company took out was right on the edge of the lawn and driveway. Since removing the stump would have ruined the driveway, they cut it down pretty close to the ground and left it.

D has been systematically killing the stump in an attempt to remove most of it and bring it flush to the grass. Sometime in the last month or so it had deteriorated enough that he was able to remove most of it and fill in the hole with some sod so that it looks like we have an uninterrupted lawn. Last Friday morning, D and I were on our way to the car when we noticed that the stump area had been dug up. The carefully placed sod had been disturbed and strewn all over the area.


Assuming this was a the work of the crazy squirrels in our neighborhood (yes they are crazy--we have one single tulip that grows among our holly bushes. Just one. And we've never planted tulips. We can only assume that a squirrel "relocated" a tulip bulb thinking he'd enjoy it later. And then it stopped being food and started being a flower.) D was cranky since he had literally just filled in the hole a few days prior, but we got in the car and went about our business.

When I got home from work that afternoon, we entered the house through the side door, going through the gate at the end of the driveway. We have a little side yard here with a small patch of grass and then lined with lilies on one side and just a mulch bed on the other. We'd pulled out a dead lilac tree earlier this spring, so hadn't done much else with it. The corner closest to the gate also has another dead tree stump, this one very old and dilapidated, the tree having been removed well before our moving into the house. Walking through the gate, I noticed this:

What used to be a completely smooth and flat, albiet dead, tree stump, now had a hole in the middle. Like a doughnut.

Me: Um, is this new?

D: Yup, I noticed that earlier today. I think it's the same crazy squirrel who dug up the other stump.

Me: Does he realize it's not dirt, it's a tree? Has he lost so many acorns that now he needs to hide them in landmarks to remember?

Annoying? Yes. Mildly destructive? Ok. But really overall, just bizarre squirrel behavior.

Saturday morning, D and I woke up to begin preparations for our Fourth of July party. Since the weather was awesome, we knew we'd be using the pool and the deck to their capacity, so I opened the back door do get to business. What's this? Why is that terra cotta planter that lives on the ledge now on the ground? Why is there dirt everywhere?

D and I have been toying with growing various herbs and such and decided this spring to grow our own garlic. We stuffed a few cloves into this pot, they started to sprout and when the weather turned nice, we took our various container gardens outside. This was the pot that had the garlic (nevermind that the garlic had died due to heat exhaustion and lack of water).


Um...where's the clove of garlic? Allow me to sum up: crazy squirrel digs up two dead tree stumps and then knocks over a planter from the ledge to the table to the deck floor, leaving a trail of dirt, digs the garlic clove out of the dirt and runs off with it.

Let me repeat: A squirrel stole our dead clove of garlic off our deck.

I've come up with two possible scenarios. The first, with the rise of the Twilight series, the squirrel--crazy and all--has decided it needs garlic to defend itself from rogue vampires. And being that the squirrel is also stupid, it doesn't know that dead garlic will not be effective. The second, and more likely, scenario, is that since the mice can no longer enter our attic, they have teamed up with the neighborhood squirrels, employing their antics to terrorize our yard. I'm not sure what the mice have to offer the squirrels, but I'm sure there is trickery afoot as apparently the mice are mentally far superior to the squirrels.