![]() ![]() When Tim walked in he found boy and squirrel immersed in their worlds, just a few feet apart. Then, during a visit from relatives, a 4-year-old in the living room watching his iPad was joined by the squirrel, who made itself comfortable in a pile of the child’s toys. This time Robin lured the squirrel upstairs and outdoors with peanuts. ![]() ![]() I got her out, and discovered she had chewed through a screen.”Ī squirrel who chewed a hole in the screen next to the dining table was discovered in the middle of the basement floor, eating a nut. “One day I heard something and called out, ‘Rob are you O.K.?’” Tim said. “If we came out to eat at the picnic table they gathered around our legs. “Sometimes the squirrels would throw themselves against the glass door to tell us they wanted peanuts,” Tim said. The viburnum looked great, but Tim and Robin were buying peanuts five or six jars at a time. “They would sit five or six feet apart and eat their peanuts,” Tim said. Tim Purtell and Robin Drake’s squirrel saga began with a jar of unsalted peanuts that Tim deployed in the yard to distract the squirrels from eating the buds on the viburnum bushes. I’m really glad I didn’t know that when I had my bike vs. I checked in with some veteran squirrel-watchers during a recent lunch at The Islander, one of whom said his brother-in-law ended up in the hospital with a dislocated shoulder when a squirrel got entangled in the spokes of his bike and brought them both down hard. Are there more of them than last year or fewer? They swing like acrobats from our birdfeeders, and make our dogs go crazy. Squirrels are nut-eating, spoke-tangling, traffic-stopping facts of life on Shelter Island and they are everywhere. We were both uninjured, but I was shaken, unlike the squirrel, who seemed delighted to have cheated death again. He darted out, passing under my bike just behind the front wheel. On a clear, warm, glorious fall afternoon, I biked down Cobbetts Lane, past stately maples, the old lima bean field, an elegant 19th-century home and a well-fattened grey squirrel crouched on the edge of the woods. ![]()
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