green pecans and squirrels

The pecan trees usually start dropping green nuts around the first of July but that didn't happen this year so I was feeling a little optimistic about this year's possible pecan harvest. Up until now anyway. This past week, and in fact just in the last few days, the trees have started unloading immature nuts. I just gathered an overflowing handful in about five minutes under one tree alone. And then there are the ones that the squirrels are taking, the half eaten ones. Maybe I shouldn't have taken the teacup down or stopped putting seed in the totem or stopped cracking a hand full of nuts from last season every morning that I tried to distract them with. But, ya know, I ran out of seed and then we were getting ready for the trip and then we were on the trip and then we were recovering from the trip and...

Those pesky squirrels, and I like squirrels, I do, I just wish they would stay the fuck off my bird feeders, OK?, are not convinced that I have taken down the teacup. They come and check periodically through the day and there's one, I think it's the same one, that will come and sit on a small branch on the tree/shrub and look at the window. We have staring contests. It'll peer this way and then that way and then up and around and then it will jump onto the screen of the adjacent window as if, I don't know what, to get a better view? And then there is one who is not confounded by the slinky on the totem bird feeder and who sits in the tallow tree just waiting for me to turn my back. I try to sic Minnie on them but she only sort of gets the program. She knows 'squirrel' and she knows about the teacup and the tree/shrub but the one that gets on the totem, she doesn't seem to get that it runs from the totem to the tallow tree which is a straight shot through the back door...back door, totem, tree.  Instead, she runs out the back door and takes a hard right and runs over to the turtle pond and goes ape shit over Big Mama sunning herself, which Big Mama tolerates for a while and then slips into the water. This is what passes for fun around here. Or exercise or rather, exercise in futility, as I admit I try to scare the begeezus out of it now and then by busting out of the back door and screaming obscenities at it. It's not fazed.

Well, I have seed now so I suppose I should start putting it out and put the teacup back up and I have a new idea to prevent that squirrel access to the totem involving metal flashing which I hope is slippery and flexible enough to prevent purchase. We'll see. So far I feel like the coyote.