Little Thief

We put out a bird feeder a week or two ago, but in all that time, we've never seen any birds in it. We could, however, see a bunch of seed shells on the ground around it, so we assumed the birds had found it, and had been helping themselves.

Then, today we saw this:

Can you see it? I know it's not a great picture. The focus isn't quite on. Here's my second shot:

Yeah, that's a squirrel hanging from our bird feeder stuffing his face with the sunflower seeds and other stuff that was supposed to be for the birds.

We've got a lot of squirrels that live in our trees, I guess we should have expected them to go after our bird food. We used to think there was only two of them...we named them Pete, and Repete. It's pretty obvious there's actually more than two of them now...though maybe they've been building themselves a little family, and the other squirrels are their kids. Who knows.

I didn't like the angle I was getting the squirrel at, so I tried to get a better, more oblique angle to get a picture from, but, when I moved, the squirrel saw me, and moved away from the bird feeder.

Then he scrambled up the branch, and disappeared. This bird feeder might be a bad idea. I don't know that we need to further encourage the squirrels to reproduce. We don't need a full on colony to install themselves in our trees.