Andrea Masciari

I held my breath all spring while the apple tree replaced its flowers with tiny golden delicious apples and the apricots began to plump up enough to ripen to their glorious amber red.  The squirrels continuously stood guard, waiting for the right moment to pounce upon our apples and apricots and peaches and plums, harvesting the premature budding crop for their insatiable appetites for homegrown fruit.  These fuzzy, gray misers live in nearby trees and under the eaves of a neighboring house, with all the comforts of hearth and home beckoning to them from our tiny backyard garden.  After several years of losing battles between rodent and human, my crazed husband chased a squirrel out of the peach tree.  The squirrel ran for his life, across the fence, onto a tree and finally, his tiny heart pounding, crouched on top of our handmade birdhouse.  He stared down at the builder of the birdhouse and gnawed profusely on his unripened treasure, chanting, I’m certain of it, “You can’t catch me.  You can’t catch me.” With blood pressure high and head hanging low, a disgusted man, not usually small in stature, threw his hands in the air and gave up.

So I found a recipe on the Web for a cayenne pepper concoction that was supposed to saturate the little buggers’ paws and burn their mouths when they ate the coveted fruit.  Nothing fatal or permanently injurious – just a little zing, a punishment, if you will, for stealing something that belongs to me.  The first rain, and the second and third, proved to render the maintenance of such a deterrent too much for me to sustain.  As the torrential downpours washed the pepper goo into the ground, the squirrels happily pranced around our backyard with the nectar of the gods dripping from their freeloading, parasitic little faces.

Last year we tried bird netting.  Mind you, we don’t have a problem with birds.  In fact, we’d be willing to share some of our fruit with sparrows and bluejays and cardinals.  The gnaw-proof black netting was intended to keep the squirrels at bay, virtually impossible for them to find their way to the bursting fruit.  It seemed to be working for a while, but I noticed the fruit’s stunted growth and small black spots on the apricots’ delicate skins.  But we kept that netting bound tight, checking each day for gaps in the netting’s closures and rejoined them together.  Tons of ugly string ties feathered the net and tree.  Finally, we beat those rogues at this game, or so we thought.  They’d have to find something else to eat, like, say, acorns.  Then one beautiful summer morning I found a squirrel cheerily munching on a black and green apricot.  With only six pieces of fruit left on the tree, I tore down the net and walked to the supermarket for a pound of California apricots for two dollars and ninety-nine cents.

After several futile attempts at various kinds of deterrents, we had just about given up.  “Not so fast,” asserted the repellent specialist at a nearby nursery, assuring us that fox urine would do the trick.  After all, the fox is a squirrel’s natural enemy, its predator, and its evil foe.  Well, even after my husband voiced his doubts because our squirrels are “city squirrels and they don’t know they’re supposed to be afraid of foxes,” we set up a series of five or six plastic bottles of the putrid stuff.  Lo and behold, a lone squirrel, a scout of sorts, probably looking to see if we were serious about this or just humoring him and his cohorts, jumped right over one of the vials hanging on the fence.   He then jumped into the apple tree, over the squirrel-eaten blueberry bush and into the apricot tree.  This isn’t funny anymore.  Perhaps it will be one day as we sip on a cool glass of Chardonnay from a cabin in the remote wilderness of Alaska.  I can deal with moose.  At least moose offer strange magical beauty and an imposing dose of otherworldliness.  They slowly, yet gently, crush everything in their path, but they don’t, as far as I know, climb apricot trees.