A rather short tale that began when, while camping, I foolishly left a bag of food unattended. I blame my thoughtlessness on lack of coffee. It was early and we wanted to be on the boat no later than 5:30, so we decided to forego coffee and just head out immediately. It was a nice day on the lake, and while we only caught a couple of small perch (pictures on Josh’s camera), we still had fun and returned to camp around 12:30.  I realized something was wrong as soon I walked over to the bag to pull out hamburger buns for our lunch. Our hamburger buns and bread had been fairly chewed on, and I figured that might be the extent of the damage.

Oh no. These squirrels were not satisfied with bread alone. As I pulled the bread items out, I noticed a hole had been chewed through the bag (one of those reuseable ones) and they had found my cookies. The cookies that were in a well-sealed container, and well-sealed it was. The thick plastic lid was still attached to the glass base, however, a nice big hole had been chewed through the lid and the squirrels hit pay-day. I estimate at least a dozen cookies were pulled out before they either ate their fill or saw us driving up.

So, lesson learned, and you can bet we made friends. The smaller squirrel, whom I called Stinker (seen below) returned often, looking for leftovers and wasn’t the slightest bit bothered our presence. Several times I’d look up and he’d be watching me at eye level in the tree next to our table, while I was looking for food or cooking. He also had a (camera shy) friend, whom returned often as well, and whom I expect to have eaten the majority of the cookies. Chunky Biscuit was morbidly obese and not a good climber, so there’s no way he pulled it off on his own.

Lesson learned.