Nutty Entertainment

I have a lot of squirrels around my house and I enjoy watching them, so a few years back my husband built me a nesting box. It sits on a tree on the side of our house and the squirrels will nest in it in the winter. When they aren’t nesting in it, I leave squirrel food on the little veranda. I like to watch them, but I can only see it from the windows in my living room. This week, my husband and I built a peanut box for the squirrels and attached it to the bottom of a tree in the front yard—viewable from my office window.

The squirrels emptied it in one day. Now the crows have gotten word of the peanuts, but are a little afraid of the mechanism that opens the lid. They just wait for the squirrels to get the nuts and bury them in various parts of our yard, and then they unbury them and take them away. I think the squirrels are on to them though, because this morning, while a crow was standing next to the box, I saw a squirrel grab a peanut and bury it in the yard. The crow promptly went about unburying it. While the crow was occupied, the squirrel grabbed another nut and ran across the street to bury it in the neighbor’s yard. The squirrel may be doing double duty, but at least he gets to keep some nuts.

Enjoy this video I took after I first put up the peanut box.