Editor’s Note: Having recovered part three of the Mac Showers biography, I will send it along as an attachment tomorrow. There is more I intend to inflict on you, notably the connection between the passing of my folks, and the real compassion and mentorship that marked the last career Mac invented. More after Ada’s war with the squirrels.

– Vic

Ada’s War
Life and Island Times

My archives coughed up a couple pieces on my mother in law Ada and her squirrel war from several years ago. As a preface: whoever said aging is about leaving the fields of life’s battles, big or small, got it all wrong.

At the time these vignettes were originally written, I had known Ada for more than a decade. She and her late husband, Tom, were deeply rooted Midwesterners like W and me from central Ohio. They were caring, peaceable, family oriented, church going, and never prone to impulsiveness or foolishness.

Ada found herself involved in a long running battle with local squirrels over who could eat from her bird feeders. Technology and military art had been applied over the years to limited and transitory effect. Greased poles, ledges, squirrel baffles and new feeders had all been tried. Meanwhile, the squirrel population had grown to legion size, suggesting that these ingenious rodents had placed a sign outside Ada’s deck proclaiming, “Free Food Today!” They all looked well fed burghers of Pataskala.

Failed technologies

Each new technique and piece of equipment was tested, found to fail by the squirrels and the prized birdfeed consumed by these fur-coated scoundrels. As a last resort, Ada purchased Lowes’ best squirrel resistant bird feeder. It took the little demons less than a day to defeat its meager defenses and empty it of seed. Ada returned it to Lowes the next day.

Consequently, Ada went DefCon 1 on this pack of thieves. She bought a trap and created her own Squirrel Relocation Program (SRP). Baiting the trap with salted peanuts in shells, she had initial success catching and relocating one on her first day of combat operations.

Eureka!

Seeing this, the squirrels figured out a series of means to defeat Ada. At first, they hopped over the trap’s trip lever, shelling and eating as many nuts as they could inside and then carrying out the rest to share with their waiting brethren.

Now low on peanuts, Ada retaliated by placing the nuts in a small brown paper bag atop the trip leaver. One capture resulted from this. The smart and crafty ones then counter-countered by reaching into the cage, pulling the bag over and looting its contents.

Now on top on her game, Ada counter-counter-countered by placing the peanuts atop the ground, covering them with a piece of window screen clothe and placing the cage atop the screened nuts. The squirrels furiously dug away at the screen only to result in three more captures. Their numbers had started to diminish.

What Ada did with the captured squirrels was another story. She would cover the caged prisoner with a seat cover, place the contraption in her car trunk and drive the half mile to a local cemetery where her late husband was buried. The detainee would then be released into the land of the departed, hopefully to never return again.

Her son, upon learning of Ada’s SRP, opined, perhaps humorously, that his mother could get into trouble with her release location. In response, she began dropping off the captives at her local church’s parking lot. Jesus saves, doesn’t he?

This type of direct-action program for a devout, Christian woman made W and me laugh out loud. We anxiously awaited her weekly calls for her front line updates.

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The squirrels persisted and started once again winning the nut war. Groups of them had commenced to rock the cage back and forth to access the shielded peanuts without entering the cage. In response, Ada staked the cage to the ground. The squirrels by this time had appointed a new field commander, and their successful nut retrievals multiplied.

Ada was forced to upgrade her operational art and science in the following weeks. Taking up a stealth position at her dining room table behind the dark shaded patio glass doors, she concluded:

· The squirrel leader Ihaff Abu Shetail and his fellow jihadis had begun eating the nuts on site less frequently, likely due to their saltiness and sameness in taste (who knew that terrorists gotta have diet diversity?); and
· I haff selected only his lightest jihadisto dig and retrieve the morsels inside the cage, thus avoiding triggering the trap closure mechanism.

Ada’s responses:

· upgrading and honing the cage closure trigger mechanism to make it lightning quick;
· substituting locally grown sweet Shellbark Hickory nuts as bait. These nuts are much larger than their Shagbark cousins and possess thicker shells. Both are similar in flavor to and more fragrant than pecans. These nuts are the squirrel version of 72 Virgins in Paradise; they couldn’t help themselves — all of them hopelessly attacked.
· placing these hickory nuts on ground, covering them with hardwood strips half an inch apart, staking these strips into the ground and then finally staking the cage atop this look but don’t eat buffet; and
· evolving her squirrel relocation program into an extraordinary rendition program. No more house of worship parking lot release for these irredeemable bastards. Now it was on the side of the six lane, 70MPH sections of I70.

In the end, Ada’s backyard squirrel population was almost zeroed, and the cage now sits on a shelf of honor in her garage.

I concluded then and still feel now that Ada is the type of person the free world needs to fight Islamic extremists. The squirrels likely honored her with a “channels only” code name — Dug.

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