The squirrels and I, we have a love/hate relationship. In general, I like them, and I like having them around, but I really dislike it when they steal from the bird feeder. As such, I do a few things to protect the feeder, which sometimes escalates to shooting the squirrels with a squirt gun. The flip side of this is that they seem to escalate from their end:
I occasionally try to make amends. I put some ears of corn out for them, but the first one was close enough to the ground for a cat-vs-squirrel skirmish to be too big of a risk. I later tied some to a tree, which seems to be the more popular option, and keeps them away from the bird feeder.
As such, some of the ground-based corn offerings were forgotten — that is, until recently. I noticed a couple of weeks ago that one had started to grow a stalk:
While gardening on Saturday, I took a closer look and discovered that there was a single ear of corn starting to grow! What a great little accidental surprise!
