Flower Friday : : Callistemon

The story of how this bottlebrush bouquet came to be on our kitchen windowsill is interesting. Well, In the grand scheme of things where nothing much happens, it's interesting anyway. 

On 12 May I posted a picture of one of our two resident grey squirrels doing what seemed to us like quite an acrobatic move toward the bird seed. Then they figured out how to jump from a branch of the bottlebrush to the top of the squirrel baffle on the main pole, put there to keep them from climbing the pole. From there made their way up to the tray where they could sit and stuff their mouths with seeds. John took off the tray so they couldn't sit on it, which produced the long reach with back legs on the thin supporting arm of the feeder and front paws just barely reaching the seeds across the gap.

Every once in awhile they venture over to the other feeder, but the seeds are enclosed in a  stiff wire cage that only allows entry for the smallest birds. Even though they can sit on the outside of the cage, they seem to know they can't reach the seeds within and they they don't waste much time trying to breech it.

At this point John decided to cut back the bottlebrush branch so they couldn't jump from it, hence the lovely bouquet on the windowsill. He put it in one of my favorite brass pots from India which I think is a perfect vase.

But the story isn't over...this morning we watched as one of the pair of squirrels leapt straight out of the bottlebrush up to the feeder, landing with  arms around it like a tree hugger. Even more astonishing was watching it execute a perfect reverse double flip away from the feeder and back into the bushes. We would have to demolish the whole bottlebrush hedge to defeat athleticism of that caliber, and their entertainment value is worth the small amount of extra birdseed they actually manage to take.

Now the ground squirrels are another story...they do stay on the ground but any acrobatics on their part are performed under the ground out of sight. They seem especially partial to pepper plants and have mowed several down to the ground overnight. Attacking our pepper plants will not be tolerated, which is why we are now building cages around all of our veggie beds....