Renovating the squirrel condo
If you’re a squirrel, a sheltered woodpile no doubt looks like a great place to spend the winter. There are lots of places to nest in complete safety and relative warmth. But squirrels don’t seem to know what woodpiles are created for – that the pile will be taken apart and burned. Yesterday the youngsters in the main stack were made aware of that sad reality.
Some of you will probably be surprised to hear that we like squirrels, and encourage them to stay by feeding them all winter. Yes, they can do a lot of damage, but we love watching them. We have squirrels living in the woodpile, in the barn, under the hot tub, under the greenhouse and who knows how many other places. A marten cruised the property last winter but if he got any squirrels, the population drop wasn’t obvious.
It hasn’t gotten particularly cold yet, so yesterday was a good day to refill the wood room in the basement – with the wood that created the first layer of the squirrel condo.
There were 4 nests in that first row of wood, made mostly from dry grass. I put the nesting material off to the side so the squirrels could fairly easily rebuild, and they were hard at work very soon after I left.
It was a short move – only about 4 feet from the nesting material to some suitable entrances.
I’m sure they were cozy again in short order.
Some of the squirrels decided in recent weeks that they wanted to stay very warm this winter, and had gnawed a hole in the wood room door large enough to get in. That door is now steel-reinforced! At the same time, a woodpecker seems to have had the same idea and did a fair bit of damage to the wood siding of the house in the same area the squirrels were working on. Luckily he gave up – and hopefully found a home in one of the dead trees nearby.
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