Roscoe

There's a squirrel named Roscoe who lives in our backyard. How do we know his name is Roscoe? We named him. How do we know that he's a boy? Wild guess. How do we know that it's him in our backyard and not some other squirrel that happened to wander over? No clue. I will note, however, that there is rarely more than one squirrel in our yard at any given time. If there are two, one of them is usually chasing the other away. It at least seems plausible that a squirrel's territory is roughly the size of our backyard (if squirrels are in fact territorial animals) and that we're usually seeing the same squirrel when we look out back.

I went into the garage one evening a few weeks ago and thought I heard an animal scurrying around. A few days later, Michelle discovered some piles of leaves arranged into a nest-like formation in the garage when she was taking out the trash. On Tuesday, she went into the garage and saw Roscoe and one of his friends inside. They ran to the back of the garage and either hid behind some sheeting or exited through some unknown crack in the wall or tunnel.

As cute as Roscoe is when he steals unripened pears from our pear trees and discards their remains in the grass after taking one squirrel-sized bite out of them, we don't really want him to use the garage as his crash pad. At the same time, I don't want this to turn into a man vs. rodent battle of Caddyshackian proportions. Attempting to squirrel-proof the garage is now on our list of President's Day weekend activities. The joys of homeownership.