The Raccoon Made Me Do It.
The raccoon made me do it.
I’ll start at the beginning. As humans, we all have a variety of innate gifts, called intelligences. No need to brag 😉, but I’ve been quite happy with mine. What I DON’T have is spatial intelligence. (OMG, you have no idea!) Solving spatial problems such as building or assembling things, seeing in 3D: I-just-don’t-get-it. Can’t do it. In my next life, please!
Considering the above, you might ask how I’ve coped all these many years with practical issues requiring spatial intelligence? CALL someone to do it for me! There you go. Put those steps together for my dog - call Ted! Can’t get the batteries out of my exercise bike - call Susie! And the beat goes on (and on and on and on.) Yes, please, just do it for me…
I wanted, whatever I wanted, assembled, RIGHT NOW! (Right now! You got it?) I’ve been gifted with wonderful friends who, when asked, say “Sure, I’ll be over shortly.” Of these good, kind, people, no one ever said “Let me show you how to do it yourself.” If they had, I would have been inwardly apoplectic. I want it NOW! (Oh, gee, how old are we, wanting instant gratification? Oh wait, be kind, human here…)
So let’s call this for what it is. My beloved, caring, friends have been inadvertent enablers. When spatial intelligence became an obstacle to something I wanted, my wonderful friends helped me, time and again, get around my apparent deficiency and enabled my desire for immediate gratification. (Immediate!)
Then came the pandemic. And the raccoon.
I loved my bird feeder. An incredibly resourceful raccoon also fell in love with my bird feeder. Winter, fewer available food sources, but wait…. there’s Jan‘s birdfeeder! Oh, whoopee! Easy din-din.
No “whoopee” from my end, however. For 6+ weeks, Ms/Mr Raccoon put me to shame. Seriously. Picture Jan shaking her head in abject frustration - night after night after night. (Especially the morning I discovered the bird feeder, dislodged from the pole once again, and dragged 20 feet away. Arghh!)
I tried everything Dr. Google suggested, everything. The only good outcome from ALL those attempts was that I now had an excellent bottle of Sriracha hot sauce which, fortunately, does have other applications beyond being smeared on a bird feeder as a (non-productive) raccoon deterrent. Hey, I take my blessings wherever I can find them.
Google options exhausted. Desperate idea, I’ll try bungee cords as as a possible deterrent! But using bungee cords, and finding the appropriate angles for attaching them to the bird feeder, is SPATIAL intelligence! Oh, no!
Here’s the Catch-22, my usual tactic for avoiding spatial intelligence challenges, asking for in-person help, was off the table. At that point in time, I had an underlying health concern that put me at higher Covid risk and limited my capacity to be around others. My usual tactic of calling….somebody, anybody….was off the table. Somewhere, the gods were, likely, chuckling at my predicament.
Stuck. Just me, Ms/Mr raccoon, and the bungee cords. Showdown at the Hutton corral!
Desperation drove my persistence. And, damn, after about a week’s worth of bungee failures, success! Ms. Spatially Challenged figured out the bungee cord angle which best inhibited the raccoon from its nightly burglaries! I did it! I did it! My smile was as wide as the horizon and bright enough to light up a small village. I can’t even begin to tell you…
Moral to this saga? Kudos to the raccoon, and yes, the pandemic, for nudging (well, actually, pushing) me in a direction I’d been actively resisting for years, completing a complicated spatial intelligence task on my own. (Never too old! Are you?) Totally unexpectedly, I now find myself possessed of a new sense of confidence in facing future spatial intelligence tasks. (Wait, did I really just write that? You bet!) Back to my grin as wide as the horizon….
I had a feeder just like that. I sold it at a yard sale last weekend. It had been a gift to my dad. He hung it on the railing of his deck and it mostly fed the squirrels. He didn’t mind. He said they gotta eat too.
After he passed I tried hanging it from my pole feeder, but it hung too low from the shepherds hook to mid baffle--one of those long black cylindrical metal things that attach to the iron pole, and the squirrels could circumnavigate the pole with a gymnastic leap and catch onto the loop at the bottom of that long feeder. Eventually I took it down and put it away.
One day while at a local hardware store I saw some miniature slinky’s and remembered a YouTube video I’d seen on how to baffle a squirrel with one. I bought two of them. I love a challenge, especially one presented to me by a squirrel. (I did go the hot sauce route one year before a squirrel could chew through a two inch thick garden door to try and get at the sunflower seeds inside. It worked.)
I attached one end of the slinky on the ring at the area of the shepherds hook where the baffle sits on and connected the second slinky to the bottom of the first one. Slid the baffle back down to sit on the ring, and voila! The squirrels didn’t afford me much entertainment as they learned pretty quick that they could not climb up the slinky. They’d get a run, jump halfway, and grab hold only to be sproinged downward. After a couple tries they knew they’d been outmaneuvered. Sometime I get to laugh at the newbies fresh out of the nest. But they too catch on quick.
The more spatially the challenge the more I’m up for it! Depending on the project, sometime I’ll even “eventually” read the directions. 😜