Quickly resize your browser window, so you can see all of the image "Tom Packs...". Then wait, maybe 10 seconds or so for it to start...

I was given a really nice bushy tailed tree rat feeder for Christmas....

But! In other news, first, the animation at the start of this page. Nothing to do with squirrels... but I didn't want to create a new page. We'll get to the tree rats in a moment.

The animation above is something I've wanted to do for years! First attempt, and shows it, but, what the heck... it was fun. This is a hint of what I go through each time I relocate.... (And no, I don't have too much time on my hands. Just too little discretion in the choices I make about how I use that time... Sigh.)

(You should fairly soon see "Tom Packs". Wait 5 seconds. To see the animation again (!?), you may find that you need to do ctrl-F5, or close, then reopen the page.)

Just before we get to the squirrel feeder...

I came across a quote this morning, something said by a Great Man. (It was published in 1832, so "thrown out" may be interpreted as "disseminated" rather than "discarded". Discard? What's that?)

"Some of my critics have amused their readers with the wildness of the schemes I have occasionally thrown out; and I have sometimes smiled along with them. Perhaps it were wiser for present reputation to offer nothing but profoundly meditated plans, but I do not think knowledge will be most advanced by that course; such sparks may kindle the energies of other minds more favourably circumstanced for pursuing the inquiries." (That's a fifth of one page of a book of 392 pages. Fascinating book: Babbage (invented computer), "On the Economy of Manufacture. Available at Gutenberg.org)

If only I could write like that, maybe I could infer from the fact that sometimes people smile, I hope, at my mad(?) schemes that in 150 years I too will be recognized as brilliant?

(And you know what Sibelius said, of critics? "No one ever put up a statue to a critic.")

But... getting back to mad schemes....

I was given a really nice bushy tailed tree rat feeder for Christmas....

Look at the close-up: The vertical brown thing on the right is an artificial "cob" of "corn".... full of squirrel health food. In the video we will get to, there was a real (dried) cob of corn on the spike there.

The image on the right shows what I have the feeder attached to... the black thing... after several design iterations... keeps raccoons on the ground. (There wasn't access from above, but therein lies a tale to come...)

The trouble is... I invite raccoons to dinner, and they might mis-understand, if the squirrel feeder was bandit faced rascal accessible.

Not a problem! (Or so I thought) I've been wanting to set up an "assault course" for the tree rats for years. So, as shown in previous photo, I fixed the feeder to my flying squirrel feeder. (Haven't seen them yet... but still trying.)

This shows the feeder (F) above the coon guard (G).... but with recent additions...

A rope (R) runs from the house to a tree (T), being wrapped around the top of the squirrel diner along the way. The idea was that squirrels, being light and nimble, could run up the tree, across the rope. (See magenta line!)

They hadn't figured it out, or "couldn't" do it, so I added the stick (S) to make it easier for them.

Ahem.

Made it too easy for Someone Else....

That's a really poor screen capture. I've now moved the video to YouTube. (I don't think any part of the technology sped up the playback... it was just a coon who liked corn!)

http://youtu.be/v1c6e0AKfck

(I can't think why you'd want it, now that there's a YouTube source, but, just in case... If you can get the following to play on your machine, it would be worth a little "fussing". It is a big file... give it a moment or so to load! But the format may be a problem. (Irfan plays .asf... but not everyone has the easy, small, free Irfan! (for Windows)). On a different computer, it played... eventually... okay in Windows Media Player.

Wow! Thank you, faithful reader, for pointing out that there were 20 seconds of "dead scene" at the end of that clip. And thank you YouTube/ Google for the amazing online editor which made it a snap to snip the dead stuff off.

2013-1-7-Coon on squirrel feeder-2.ASF SAME AS ...e0AKfck ABOVE... alternate. See below for OTHER.

So. The stick is now gone, and the tree rats can either figure out the rope, or I'll have to go to plan ... what are we up to? Way past "B", anyway.

Of course, tonight we find out if the rope is sufficiently difficult for the coons...

(The story continues... for several days/ nights, the rope alone has seemed to be too much trouble for the raccoons... but the squirrels have yet to figure out even their "drawbridge", let alone the rope. But the birds are appreciating the peanut butter I'm using to create activity near the squirrel food!)

Next morning...

Well, safely through one night. But now to "train" the squirrels to get to their food. As I lay in bed pondering the problem, I had a moment of inspiration. (The feeder is visible from bed.) So now, for the daylight, around- here- racoon- less hours, there is a 2x4 "bridge" from the ground up to the tree rat food. Come the evening, I will "pull up the drawbridge" for the night....

Summer 2012

Remember I said above that the pole the new-at-Christmas 2012 squirrel feeder has been mounted on was old? For feeding the nocturnal flying squirrels, if I have any?

Well... getting that coon- proof was another story of design iterations. In the color picture above you can see, below the big black anti-climbing guard marked "G" two large diameter plastic pipes meant to make climbing difficult. Ha.

Here's a video from summer 2012. Although the link below comes first, it is my third attempt to provide the video to you! This time: YouTube. The star of the show had two big nursing pups ("cubs"?) at the time...

To get it onto YouTube, I had to convert the format, but the lovely, free, Any Video Converter seemed to Just Work! (I found a link to it from an established site, where it seemed popular. I used MP4 as the output format because that's what Any Video Converter defaulted to... I really don't know what I'm doing here... but it seemed to work! Here the video is again, non-YouTube, in an attempt at a more internet-friendly file format... Tell me if the following works well for you? (It is half the size of the original.) The star of the show had two big nursing pups ("cubs"?) at the time...

2012-8-22-Coon_x264.mp4 SAME AS ...AzS5U8 ABOVE... alternate. See above that for ONE OTHER.. which you may have viewed already.

(The conversion by the delightful "Any Video Converter", free, which at least seemed to Just Work. (I haven't tested it much yet. Was MP4 a good output choice? I don't know... it is what the converter defaulted to.)

(If the above link didn't work well for you, the following will load like the other one. If the other one went well, you might enjoy the following.

2012-8-22-Coon.ASF SAME AS ...AzS5U8 ABOVE... alternate. See above that for ONE OTHER.. which you may have viewed already.

Page tested for compliance with INDUSTRY (not MS-only) standards, using the free, publicly accessible validator at validator.w3.org. Mostly passes. There were two "unknown attributes" in Google+ button code. Sigh.

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