Also Sprach Zarathustra

When I got up this morning the bird feeding bottle was down on the ground and four squirrels were gathered around it acting like the monkies with the monolith in the motion picture "2001".

For several minutes the recumbent vessel lay ripe for the plucking in the center of the squirrel circle, but none of the little gray seed-stalkers could make themselves get within a foot of it. So I went outside and put the feeder back in its rightful place on the long wire hanging from the mostly dead flowering crab branch. There was still food remaining so I did not bother to refill it.

About twenty minutes later, during our breakfast, Mars suddenly mentioned that the perch had been unscrewed from the bottle, and the remaining sunflowers had spilled to the ground. "Unscrewed?" I asked incredulously. "Unscrewed!" she replied.

The decanter, now totally seedless, basically weightless, and still hanging from its long white wire, swayed slowly back and forth in the barely existent early morning breeze. Periodically one of the squirrels would climb out to the point on the branch from which he would normally descend to the feeder and stare down with a baffled look on his face. Then he would scratch his right haunch with his right rear foot - presumably because he couldn't reach his head - and slowly descend the tree, along the way checking out the suet box on an adjacent limb.

A while later Mars noticed that the bottle was no longer visible and soon thereafter I strolled outside to replenish the food supply. The vacant wire still hung limply from the tree, and the screw-on perch lay directly underneath. The bottle was nowhere in sight. Nor were the squirrels.

I went into the house to ask Mars if she had seen where it might have gone. She laughed. After re-patrolling the immediate area again I began to widen the range of my search and spotted the missing magnum down at the end of the driveway. A couple of small bites had been taken out of the base, but other than that the container was still usable. I refilled it, re-hung it, and returned to the refuge of our family room. There was still no sign of the squirrels other than the tooth marks in the polymer.

About a half hour later I went outside to warm up the car and all four little gray tree rats lined up along the side of the driveway with their front paws extended over their heads and bowed forward from the waist in the "we are not worthy" salutation.

Well not really. Actually they were gathered around the tree in their normal predatory poses preparing to resume their morning of gluttony. But I knew in my heart that if they hadn't been evolutionarily wired to focus one-hundred-ten percent at all times on feeding their furry faces they would have accorded me the aforementioned honor.

Or not. I do however like to believe that somewhere deep in the tiny recesses of their meager little minds - but not the part that figures out how to unscrew metal perches - they are in some small rodent way appreciative of what we do for them.

In any event, they sure are fun to watch.