"Do we feed the birds," he asked, "just to help sustain them in bad weather, and at times when feeding young nestlings is hard work for the parents and especially when caterpillers or whatever they give to them, might be, for one reason or another, in short supply? Or is there a strong element of feeding our own egos in it?"
He was having a short period of doubt as to his whole performance when he found out that the squirrels, which regularly tried to bite through the wire of his feeding devices, and sometimes were successful, were also causing depredation in another part of the property. For, in a sheltered grove, he had for 20 years been watching with anxious care the growth of cones of his favourite tree; stone pine or pinus pinea. These were grown from seed he had picked up in various parts of the Mediterranean shores and had at last produced full-grown cones. They are the size at least of a big orange.
He had failed to get, the nuts within, a satisfactory seedling to grow a second, Irishbased, generation. And then came the squirrels (grey) out of the blue a few seasons ago. They didn't really disturb the birds too much, or even manage to spill too much of their monkeynuts. And then this year he finds what may really have drawn them to him - devastation among the pine cones. The ground was littered, when he came back from holiday, with cones chewed and scattered, the big, the small and the in-betweens. There is now not one cone on any of the dozen or so trees.
Grey squirrels are not protected; they may be shot. But, ah, the lost years. As if that wasn't enough, he says that looking out of his bedroom window he saw a nimble figure climbing up the tree from which the feeders hang. One of those squirrels had produced young, he thought. He went to the window and saw that the agile and obviously regular attender was, in fact, a small rat.
What next? Mink can climb trees; so can badgers at a push. And otters, though mink and otters probably are not nut-eaters, though the fat which is always provided might encourage them. You don't want to put down rat poison in case the corpse - and they usually seem to die in the open - might be eaten by, say, an owl or any raptor. Or a fox. Problems, problems.