We found out a new thing recently. I kind of spoiled it in the header (and also that photo), but just act like you don’t know anyway for the big reveal: Squirrels like cookies. Or at least, oatmeal raisin cookies.
I picked some up this weekend and added it to the coffee table Jackie had out while she and a friend were having coffee on the porch. She already had some Parle-G cookies out–an East Indian product that is effectively a classic biscuit-style cookie that any number of other companies make, but crazy cheap and quite good–so I added the clam shell pack of oatmeal raisin to the mix. We all had some of both and it was delicious and a good time was had by all.
And that should’ve been the end of what may have otherwise been a pretty normal event. Certainly nothing worth writing up a website post about, am I right?
But then we went inside briefly.
I should say at this point that we’ve never had a problem with the local fauna stealing our food, so the concept of bringing the cookies in (“Perhaps, love of my life, we’d be best bringing in our cookiesnackery, lest they get purloined by something of the rodent family gone rogue”) never passed my mind.
But evidently it should have.
Perhaps 10-15 minutes later, I stepped back out onto the porch and was shocked motionless by the sight of a black squirrel on the coffee table with a large oatmeal cookie in its mouth. As I started feeling around for my phone to get a photo–this isn’t Nessie or Bigfoot we’re talking about, but one can appreciate it was an unusual circumstance that would make an amusing pic–I evidently startled it and it ran off the porch (cookie still in its mouth, of course; I noted as he made his escape that the little bowl that had held the Parle-G cookies was tipped over with tell-tale crumbs beside it) and ran beside our little Japanese maple, where it sat and began eating the cookie.
I stepped in and rallied the family to come and get a load of this!, and we all went out to the porch and edged a viewing angle around the maple to get a look at the furry cookienapper who, to his credit, was busy looking goddamned adorable, eating the cookie as he turned it clockwise.
We clearly got too close for comfort, however, and it bolted away from the maple and under a small shrubby tree next to the porch, only to appear moments later sans cookie. That, paired with the missing Parle-G cookies (evidently also a squirrel favourite?), suggested that it must have been stashing at least some of them under the shrubby tree, perhaps as a midnight snack. Or, since squirrels are known for stealing nuts (and flower bulbs) and burying them elsewhere only to seemingly forget where they were, perhaps to provide some other creature with a midnight snack.
Suffice to say, we won’t turn our backs on our porch cookies again.