About 20 years ago a friend of mine gave me a weather station for Christmas. Like this:
You hang this doo-dad outside and it transmits weather information to the screen pictured above. When I moved to The Home a year ago, I hung the doo-dad outside on a tree. Yesterday, I noticed that it was gone. However its battery cover was lying on the ground. I have a camera in my living room window for watching the birds and after careful scrolling through it, I made the following discovery:
ETA: Yes! Watch the crotch of the tree and stay til the end. Makes you wonder what else the li’l stinker has tucked in his nest-- glasses, car keys, pens, cell phones?
This is a free upload and will expire in 24 hours.
We feed the birds and squirrels. Occasionally feeders are knocked out of the tree and get dragged off. I blame the raccoons.
Years ago before I moved in with my gf, I had a bird feeder torn apart it hung on a shepherd’s crook that was badly bent.
My son was ~10 at the time. He was helping me attempt to fix the damage. He pointed out that if the two of us were struggling to straighten the pole, surely a raccoon couldn’t be responsible. The next day I saw a black bear in my yard.
I kept having seed bells disappear from the shepherd’s crook in my backyard. One day I discovered why - the crows are smart enough to lift the hanging string over the crook so they could fly away with the bell and peck at it at their leisure.
Crows are too damn smart! I thought squirrels wouldn’t be a problem because there aren’t any palm trees within 50 yards of my place except mine, which is too small for them to inhabit. But what did I see the other day? A squirrel came right up to my office window and chattered at me, apparently berating me for not refilling the bird feeder.
This morning I found one battery on the ground near the disappearing transmitter.
I fully expect that one of these days I’ll find the original transmitter on the ground when it falls out of wherever the squirrel has it secreted.
I ordered a new weather station from amazon and I had it up and installed 24 hours after the squirrel theft. I put the transmitter in the same place, for good or ill, but secured the top near the hook with a couple of layers of duct tape (the Universal Remedy). I don’t see this as a permanent solution. I’ll be keeping an eye on it.
On the upside, the new transmitter’s signal is being received by the old screen (same brand of weather station), so now I have the screens in two places in the apartment. No weather data is going to get past me!
The company has a thing that you can put over the sensor to secure it and protect it. But I really don’t want to drill multiple holes into this tree. It’s not my tree, after all.
My dad has the same trouble with bears getting at his bird feeders. He now has an elaborate system of lines and pulleys to elevate the feeders to where the bears can’t get to the feeders.
Personally I hate squirrels. They have chewed into all 4 corners of my house over the 15 years I’ve been there, such that I’m on a ladder with lumber and paint. They have found a new way in that I can’t find. Squirrels running in the attic at 6 am is really annoying. At this point the floor of the crawl space is 75% black walnut shells.
I think they’re taunting me, too. I frequently find a walnut sitting on the latch for the gate.
So that’s what happened to our weather transmitter! It looked like someone had cut through the plastic zip tie and then left it on the ground under the tree. My husband blamed the old man with dementia next door, but now I see that it was one of the many squirrels who scrabble around in our redwood trees.
Squirrels drive me nuts, too. Just recently they’ve begun gnawing on our new wooden fence, and also crapping on it, right where we have to put our hand to open the latch. They’d better not find a way into our attic; rats are bad enough.
Squirrels are evil. They have ruined my outbuilding. My canoe is filled with walnut husks, as is my wife’s bow case.
She, who will not let me staple one to the side of a tree as an example to the rest.
Most importantly, we have a Sasquatch cutout my dad bought for the kids that we have down in the side yard. One year,she put a cheap dollar store Santa hat on it.
That hat was MIA for a while. Then, we found it. WAY up in the tree, in a knot where it had clearly been taken for a purpose…
