Who can not love faces like these?

Squirrels Are as Affected by Hurricanes as Humans

I just had to do something.

"Oh for crying out loud. They are just squirrels! They are pests, just rats with fuzzy tails!"

Nah, not really. Squirrels have just as much right to live as you. And, under the wrong circumstances, squirrels can be a meal. See there, two realities that seem contradictory but aren't. Wasn't that fun?

On to the story here:

We, my wife and I and the two cats, have all enjoyed having families of squirrels in the trees behind our house. When Isaias blew through, it literally stripped almost all the leaves out of the trees that were left standing. All of the squirrel nests were just gone. Not a trace. It doesn't require much imagination to conclude some squirrels lost their lives in that storm.

I wanted to do something to try to help them out, so I did what I always do, DuckDuckGo. I found squirrelrefuge.org which gave me the idea and a basic plan to build a squirrel house.

Two Things:

1) Making and mounting that squirrel house was a lot more work than I expected. 2) I really failed at documenting the process. The final house out there in the tree has flashing on the high edge of the roof, along with a coat of Henry's Elastomeric Coating which will make it practically watertight. Those things are not in any of the pics or the video. Sorry.

Let's jump right to the video:

As it turned out, I had to abandon my plan to lash the mount to the tree. Instead I did what I had tried to avoid: I used screws. The weight of the house made it impossible for me to get the mule line I was using tight enough to hold the house stable. Oh well, when something doesn't work, own it. Punt.

Here are the few pics I did take. The captions help fill in some blanks.

The Gallery

This was a LOT of work. I bought materials for three. At this point, this may be the only one I actually build. So far no squirrels have taken ownership of the new abode. I suspect by this time next year, though, we will have tenants in the squirrel house.

This might be a thing that works, we'll have to see. If we get tenants, the squirrel house will have become a home.