At war with squirrels

WASHINGTON – In the beginning – before Bill Adler Jr. became an author, a self-help guru or a guest on the “Rosie O’Donnell Show” – there was a confrontation between man and squirrel.

On one side of the window was Adler: former lobbyist, fledgling free-lance writer and proud new owner of a bird feeder.

On the other side was a gray squirrel. Lounging inside Adler’s feeder. Eating the birdseed.

“The feeder was not for the squirrel. It was for the birds,” Adler remembers thinking that day in 1987. “So I got mad.”

After this suburban stare-down, Adler’s life changed. He wrote a book, “Outwitting Squirrels,” which happened to take off as the country’s bird-feeding industry exploded into a billion-dollar business. This book led to others, on “outwitting” everything from deer to toddlers to stress. Now Adler presides over a small how-to empire.

“That squirrel launched my writing career,” he said. “I guess I shouldn’t have been so mad at it.”

To understand Adler’s story, it’s important for those who don’t feed the birds to understand how those who do feel about squirrels.

They aren’t cute. This crowd knows that squirrels are capable of impossible leaps, upside-down dangles and other ninja moves to raid bird feeders. They also know that squirrels do not share with birds: They are furry thieves, driven beyond decency in their all-consuming quest for the next nut.

“They’re in the same family as rats and mice,” said Steve Runnels, president and chief executive of the 20,000-member American Birding Association. “They just look good.”

Some birders just give up and accept them. Some have waged their own campaigns aimed at confusing, frightening or frustrating them into eating the neighbor’s birdseed instead.

“Feed ‘em or defeat ‘em,” said John Schaust, chief naturalist for Wild Birds Unlimited, a chain of birding supply stores.

Adler, who would come to champion the “defeat ‘em” camp, grew up in Manhattan, barely aware that squirrels existed. Then he moved to Washington, quit his job in politics and set up a home office. He bought a feeder to entertain himself. And then the squirrel showed up.

Adler banged on the window. He sprayed the wall with slippery Teflon. He built a fortress of old Perrier bottles around the bird feeder. He waited in ambush with a child’s dart gun. None of it worked for long.

After a while, it struck Adler that a larger principle was at stake.

“If we can’t outwit squirrels, who have brains the size of walnuts, how can we ever get a man or woman to Mars?” he said. “It’s a matter of pride.”

Adler interviewed experts, and crawled around his yard on all fours – to see the feeder from a squirrel’s perspective. He used this insight to write a book. Among other tactics, the book recommends putting plastic shields, called baffles, around feeders and smearing the area around the feeder with a squirrel-repellent mixture of Vaseline and red pepper.

To this serious advice, Adler added a leavening of humor. “Build a special cannon,” the book counsels. “It’ll be about 10 feet long and six inches wide and will fire cats. Aim this catgun directly at squirrels.”

The book came out in 1988 – the perfect moment. The birding industry would undergo a historic growth spurt in the next 15 years. The country’s population was aging, and more people were becoming interested in a wildlife experience that was accessible from their kitchen window.

Hundreds of birdcentric stores popped up nationwide. One federal report in 2001 found that America’s bird enthusiasts were generating about $32 billion in retail sales annually.

And Adler was in on the ground floor. “Outwitting Squirrels: 101 Cunning Stratagems to Reduce Dramatically the Egregious Misappropriation of Seed from Your Birdfeeder by Squirrels” sold more than 300,000 copies. In its sequel for the gardening crowd, “Outwitting Deer,” Adler wrote, “Deer are very, very big squirrels.”

After that, there was “Outwitting Critters,” “Outwitting Clutter,” “Outwitting Writer’s Block” and more – some written by Adler, some by others. The “Outwitting” books have collectively sold more than a million copies, said Adler, now a full-time author dividing his days between the “Outwitting” series and other literary projects.

So Adler did well. But what about the brethren of that first squirrel? Have they finally been defeated?

You might as well ask if Richard Simmons’ success has meant the end of fat.

Certainly, there have been advances in anti-squirrel technology. A Rhode Island company now offers a $120 bird feeder called the “Yankee Flipper.” It senses the weight of a squirrel and, using a motorized spinning perch, flings the stunned animal away at top speed.

But it’s a birding industry truism that there’s still no such thing as a squirrel-proof feeder. The best to be hoped for is “squirrel-resistant,” said David Horn, a biology professor at Aurora University in Illinois who has researched antisquirrel devices.

“There will always be that one exception. There will always be that super-squirrel” to beat any feeder, Horn said.

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