A Squirrel’S Friend As Long As Eugene Young Is Willing To Feed Them, Those Bushy-Tailed Rodents Will Have Plenty To Eat

When Eugene Young realized squirrels were getting into the seed he set out for sparrows, he didn’t get mad.

He made things even by giving the squirrels a feeder of their own, created from a coffee can with a hinged plywood lid.

The squirrels have learned to tip the can to get at the crackers, grapes, peanuts and sunflower seeds inside. And when the can tips, it activates a buzzer that rings inside Young’s house to alert him of hungry rodents. Then he can sit out on the back step and feed them by hand.

Why go to so much trouble for the squirrels?

“Some people have trouble with them,” he conceded. “But I just like them.”

“He has fun doing it,” added his wife Selma. “He can turn the bell off if he’ll be gone, so it doesn’t bother me.”

The squirrel buzzer has a different ring than the doorbell, so the North Side couple knows which way to head when the bells sound.

For three years, Young has not only been feeding squirrels but keeping track of their comings and goings. On a calendar, he makes careful notations like “5:30 BT,” meaning “Bushy Tail” stopped by at 5:30 a.m. Some days, there are as many as five furry visitors. Some days there are none.

“You never know,” Selma said. “It’s kind of fun to wait and see if they’ll come.”

“They can get to be kind of a nuisance,” Young said. The smile in his eyes lets you know he really doesn’t mind at all.

Young, 80, worked as an electrician for 40 years in Spokane, and he keeps his skills sharp with projects like the squirrel alarm and feeder.

Down in his basement, there’s also a can crusher he rigged up to run on an old coal stoker motor and a vast collection of rocks.

The Youngs have visited all 50 states and, as they did, they collected rocks - piling hundreds of pounds of them in the back of their station wagon - and hauled them back home. Then Eugene sliced them like cheese with a rock saw, revealing the stripes, waves, colors and crystals packed inside.

Dozens of shelves in the orderly basement proudly display the rock halves. Small drawers hold thousands of others he polished himself with a rock tumbler.

“Each one stayed in the tumbler for two months,” he said. Every so often, he lines up the drawers to marvel at the rocks’ shiny surfaces.

“I just like to look at them,” he said.

There’s mudstone from Missouri, holey like Swiss cheese; fire-orange wonderstone from Utah; petrified wood from Arizona; and one that looks like an oil painting of lily pads from Oregon.

“I’m not much for sitting at all,” Young said. “I like to be doing.”