2023, animals, Family, holidays, home, Mysteries

Pumpkin Eaters!

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Today’s post is inspired by Anna’s “I went for a walk in my neighborhood” posts.

I normally wait until right before Halloween to buy pumpkins for our front steps, with the hope that they’ll last until Thanksgiving.  This is a fool’s errand, as it usually only takes my neighborhood squirrels about a week to figure out there are good eats on the front steps.  I almost always get the pumpkins from Mt. Olivet near my house.  The prices are in line with other pumpkin vendors and the money always goes to one of the youth groups. 

This year YA went with me to choose the three pumpkins that would grace our front steps – normally she leaves this to me.  While I always choose standard orange pumpkins, usually all about the same size, YA wanted a big pink variety this year.  After she had decided on the big pink one, she let me choose the other two.  I stuck with my orange tradition.

As other years, it took several days before I noticed the first teeth marks on the pink pumpkin.  By Halloween, it had a good hole so I just turned that side to the back.  As the days have gone by, more and more of the pumpkin has been eaten up – as of yesterday, it looks like a shallow bowl filled with seeds.  I’m happy that critters get good meals out of the decorations – I hate to think of them just going into landfill somewhere.

What I don’t understand is why they are only eating the pink one?  Is this a squirrel mania, like eating one course of your meal at a time?  Will the pink one have to be completely gone before they start in on the orange ones?

Are you feeding any wild critters these days? t

38 thoughts on “Pumpkin Eaters!”

  1. Word around the squirrel community is that it was a Barbie pumpkin.

    Our flowering crabapple was loaded this year and is popular with the birds and squirrels into the winter. In the front we have a pagoda dogwood and a thornless hawthorne, both of which produce edible fruit for critters. As we go into winter I’ll start stocking the bird/squirrel feeder with seed. Rabbits come at night to eat some of the spilled seed and also fallen crabapples.

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  3. We just have a bird feeder for most of the birds in the neighborhood plus a suet cake in a cage we tack onto a tree for the woodpeckers.

    Oh, yes, the squirrels and bunnies and deer help themselves to whatever the heck they want in the garden when it’s growing season, but we don’t intentionally feed them. 😦

    Chris in Owatonna

    **BSP** There’s going to be a huge book festival at the River Falls Public Library on Saturday, Nov. 11, from 10:30-12:30 (browsing and buying), then an author panel and Q&A until 2:00. More than 40 local authors, including yours truly, will be there selling and signing books.

    This is the first year the library is doing this, and it looks like it may turn out to be an annual event if the attendance is good. So come on over, tell your friends and family, and support literacy, libraries, and local authors all at the same time. **End BSP**

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  4. Did anyone else get this msg. this morning on WP, when you tried to reply?
    Never miss a beat!
    Interested in getting blog post updates? Simply click the button below to stay in the loop!

    To make it go away I had to close and start again, now I don’t see it.

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    3. No, I’m having my usual circular reasoning troubles and now it won’t post my comments until I refresh the page but I didn’t see that one. There was something at the very end of yesterday’s discussion that didn’t look familiar.

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    4. I wish I were more helpful about WP’s issues. Unfortunately I am one of the lucky ones and I so rarely have any glitches that I can’t give advice. I’ve even tried to replicate errors and that doesn’t work either.

      Anyway, it’s probably not useful for me to say I didn’t get the message….. SORRY!

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    5. Re: WordPress – I’ve been searching for anyone else who suddenly started getting that modal after commenting! I thought I had made it go away but it is back again 😦

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  5. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    Several weeks ago as I was clearing the garden, I found that rodents had gotten into a bag of grass seed stored under the deck. We have a metal trash can in which we store birdseed. After we cleaned up the mess with a shop vac, we stored the remaining seeds in that, giving the birdseed some company. Rodents make a mess to be sure. So now you now we also feed birds through the winter.

    The squirrels will be in tomato withdrawal after I took the plants down. They feasted on those July through October.

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    1. I have experienced this disaster as well. I probably shouldn’t admit that it’s actually happened more than once. You’d think that after one big clean up like this, I would be more careful…..

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  6. One of the most charming books from Joel’s childhood was Mouskin’s Golden House by Edna Miller. A quote by the author from Goodreads: “One evening I noticed a small, white-footed mouse exploring the jack-o’-lantern for the few seeds it contained. I thought what a fine house it would make for a white-footed mouse who forever discards one home and searches for another.”
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1358197.Mousekin_s_Golden_House

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      2. It’s remarkable how collectible some of those commonplace children’s books are. Because they were children’s books and not made for permanence, relatively few survive. One book of that sort is <TheTall Book of Make-Believe. If you google it, you can see the unaccountable prices vendors are asking.

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  7. Ah… what was the question again?
    I don’t have a safe place for feeders at this point, but I do have a squirrel friend who was perched on the edge of a watering can I had left by the lilac bush out front. It had filled to the brim after recent rains, and s/he had a good drink, was fun to watch.

    Our swamp oak out front is giving them plenty of acorns to bury.

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  8. I love feeding birds. They’re like good friends during the long winter. Unfortunately, the HOA is making it harder and harder to do. I have to hide a bird feeder behind my deck wall because bird feeders are VERBOTEN. I don’t feed birds during the summer because it has to be done right on my deck and it gets awfully messy. I usually start feeding about now and end in early to mid spring. I haven’t started feeding yet but I’m probably going to soon.

    The new thing here is that the City of Northfield has made an ordinance forbidding open flame within 15 feet of a multiple family structure (apartments and condominiums). So my grill is VERBOTEN too unless I move it out into the narrow lane that serves as my street.

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  9. We feed birds with black oil sunflower seeds. Our hazel shrubs were stripped of nuts by squirrels and bluejays.. i asked Husband to clean up spilled sunflower seeds in the garage since mechanics found evidence of mice in the interior car filters when I had the oil changed last week.

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        4. Not as easy as you think. I can tell you from firsthand experience that there’s a whole generation of kids becoming young adults now who don’t even know who Martin Luther was.

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  11. Have not had had close vision for three days, even with enlarged type.
    I have a sunflower seed feeder hanging from a tree limb with my three stage squirrel guard that works. Hanging from the bottom of that is a suet cage. The squirrels pickup the spillage as do my four turkey hens who now spend the day just off my yard in the brush. When I fill the feeder, they come out and stand beside me to watch. Lately in the evening two young possums come out too.
    Only four old guard renters are left here, three of us living in a row. Patrick is upset about the turkeys. He demands I drive them away because they upset his cat when the run by his patio.
    We are not allowed any kind of grills.
    Clyde

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  12. i used to hate squirrels
    now i like them
    nice too
    my feeders that keep getting knocked down feed the commmunity

    gold finches become camaflouge finches until april and others say hi out back too

    pumpkins last forever on my steps

    rabbits are everywhere this year

    can’t throw feed out into the yard my dogs will eat it and crap all over the house

    critters are the key to life

    love anna’s posts

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  14. My pumpkin has been nibbled on by the local squirrels. If it’s still mostly intact, I will pass it on to my farmer friends when next I see them (they feed any leftover pumpkins they can get their hands on to their pigs). I didn’t carve it this year – so I suspect it has lasted longer because it’s been harder to gnaw on.

    The other day on a walk I chose not to comment on what was left of (I suspect) a hawk’s dinner – either that or a Godfather-like warning to the local rabbits. Eeeew.

    Until this summer I had a lovely spruce tree in my front yard that was a gathering spot for the local avians. Alas, it got some sort of disease (or too much road salt) and it is no more. I had to take it down. Took awhile for the cardinals to quit looking for it – and more’s the pity, it was lovely seeing them in that tree. Will have to ponder what to put in its place come spring…

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  15. I put out peanuts and corn for the squirrels, suet and seed for the birds, apple cores and grapes for the rabbits and possums, cheap cat food for the Siamese feline who comes around. I have a compost bin and toss all kinds of stuff around the base of it. Any critter who wants to partake is welcome to it.

    I have a mountain ash that produces berries that are a favorite of the cedar waxwings. After it started producing fruit, grey dogwood started to spring up in the same area. I think the waxwings seeded it there.

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