Little Bastards

I love laughing at this tenacious little bastard. I wish my fruit trees were equipped with such devices. My resident squirrel was at it again today. I went out back with the dog so he could make pee-pees and the little bastard was running across the top of the fence heading toward one of the avocado trees. Then he jumped into the tree and ran up the main trunk. I walked around the bottom of the tree trying to see where he went. He was doing the ol' ring-around-the-tree keep away dance so I decided to climb up in the tree to scare him. Well, when he saw me climbing up into the tree he had a look on his face like he could shit a brick. Then he jumped onto a smaller limb which was within my reach so I grabbed onto it and gave it a good shake. At that point he high-tailed it and jumped onto the roof of the house and hauled ass, I know not where.

Well, lo and behold, when I climbed down from that tree I noticed that the fluffy-tailed tree rat had already knocked down an avocado from the other tree. This one wasn't half eaten; it only had a small bite mark at the top by the stem.

Too bad my air rifle broke a long time ago. I was quite good at dispatching the little bastards to the great fruit buffet in the sky. Oh well. I'll just have to put up with tons of half-eaten fruit.

And just out of curiosity, I investigated whether or not the local squirrels are diseased little buggers and it turns out that they are not as I had suspected. They're pretty healthy for thieving little fluffy-tailed tree rats.