November is the best month here in the vineyard. It’s all autumn colors, blue skies, warm days, the occasional rain shower, and scurrying critters of all kinds stuffing their fat cheeks with even more fresh acorns. It’s a complete turnaround from a few weeks ago when the insufferable drought was killing us. Wow, what a change a few weeks can make. Ever since Gavin Newsom beat back the Recall things have been falling on the lucky side of life: politics, rain, humidity, booster shots, and squirrel abatement. For example last week it rained buckets, literally buckets of water, from the newest Pacific atmospheric river and dumped it all on California. You’ll see what I mean by the lucky side of things when I tell you that so much water fell that it flooded, to my utter climate-changing glee, a pesky den of ground squirrels in what’s been known around here as Squirrel Town.
It was climate change that brought the ground squirrels here in the first place. One then two then six then they split between north and south and then further divided steep and flat until I lost count. The ground squirrels were everywhere. Evidently the drought and the dryness of the soil was firm enough to enable hundreds of interlocking tunnels that encompassed underground Squirrel Town and it was expertly located between vineyard blocks where the workers didn’t roam and a small grove of oaks helped stabilize the soil’s steepness.
Holes in the ground, holes next to the trees, escape holes hidden under rocks, holes in holes. Heads were constantly popping up out of the holes like a Whack-A-Squirrel vineyard edition.
Admittedly, Squirrel Town didn’t arrive overnight. The drought has been happening for a while now and so this squirrel activity has stretched over a year of patient digging and planning. When they first came and infiltrated the vineyard hillside, squirrels were an oddity around here but three years of wildfires have decimated predators of all types: raptors, bobcats, coyotes, rattlesnakes. So now my vineyard has an abundance of rodents who burrow into the ground rather than play innocently about in the trees. Oddly enough the beautiful Napa Valley scenery makes the place look like a sophisticated prairie dog town with wine service. It even comes with a Maitre’d, a savvy squirrel lookout who watches out for danger and intruders and when the warning cry goes out the entire hillside seems to jump up, stop eating, and move quickly underground.
So far the squirrels have stayed away from the vineyard grapes. There’s been no harm really. Thankfully they seem preoccupied with the billions of acorns in the vicinity and where to hide and how to remember them all but I don’t like all these rodents and I don’t want them about. I consider them destructive and they certainly haven’t made friends with my wife and her garden.
I have patiently waited for Mother Nature to take its course—too many squirrels in too many shallow holes should attract lots of predators. But it isn’t happening fast enough. Squirrel Town is expanding exponentially. So I added several large buckets of fresh water for whatever predators were about, thinking the big guys must get thirsty, too.
And it worked.
Every morning and twilight the coyotes ran across the canopy of Squirrel Town sniffing and jumping up and down on the holes like a gang of juvenile delinquents. They’d visit the watering station, get their fill, and then come back and cry out coyote taunts at one end of Squirrel Town while the others waited quietly for squirrels to dart out and change holes. And dart out the tasty rodents evidently did do because the bad boys would howl and cry and jeer like hyenas for a good half hour. It can wake you from your deepest sleep at midnight and make you think about what you would do if you were sleeping in a dirt cave with loud thugs overhead stomping on your roof. It’s one reason why I think squirrels are in general neurotic and overly jumpy.
The great hawks that fly about generally drink out of the bird baths I put out for all birds and I have never seen them share the coyote watering hole. But they do like to sit on their favorite branch directly above Squirrel Town, especially the spotted-shoulder hawk who is slightly smaller than the atypical red-tailed hawk but is a dive-bombing fanatic who zooms over Squirrel Town at 50 miles per hour and essentially grabs a squirrel just getting out of its hole. It happens so fast that all you see is this dark thing the size of a cat flying like a jet just a few feet above the ground.
There are several owls now that there is food and they like who-whoing with me at twilight. Sometimes they are so chatty that they fly around the property who-whoing as if running a radar scan that ends in the trees surrounding Squirrel Town. Poor Squirrel Town. It might as well have a neon sign that says “Eat Here” because I find bits of owl-nibbled squirrel tail all over the place.
A few months ago I decided to mess with the squirrels’ heads and I put up one of those plastic owl statues you can buy at garden centers and secured it to the top of a row-ending vine trellis pole. The plastic owl has reflective eyes and the wind makes it move and vibrate realistically. I think the plastic owl’s appearance flipped the little squirrels out. After all the owl never moves. It’s always there in the same spot like an iron-willed predator. Then I moved the owl to another location, just to mess, and then another the next day and then I didn’t move it at all. My wife thought I was getting a little obsessive about it until one day all her carrots in the garden were gone and I judiciously mentioned that the squirrels probably did it. I soon got the green light to pursue.
A bobcat roams our hillsides and visits infrequently, typically seen by my wife whose art studio is filled with large panes of glass in every direction. I tend to see the bobcat in the morning walking either to or from the coyote watering station. Every once in a while as I take in a dinnertime glass of wine on the upper front porch, I’ll see the bobcat walking up and down the rows of vines, occasionally scrambling after a mouse, or just plotting along like a giant kitty cat who could kick your ass if it wanted to. One night in late summer, a band of coyotes came to the waterhole and starting a yipping chant. There must have been a dozen coyotes yipping out of tune with each other. The band moved over to the edge of the vineyard and yipped and yapped at an even higher pitch until a loud warning growl came from up in the tree. The gang fell silent as the bobcat screamed back at them. Then the coyotes yipped a little more in tune and moved over to Squirrel Town for the same insidious tactics atop the squirrels’ roofs. It is my observation that animal species really don’t care for one another.
Anyway, just before the big rain, I went about the property preparing for heavy winds and rain, and I stopped obsessing about the plastic owl and placed it back on garden detail where the rabbits and quail have been dining all summer long on the lettuce.
So, remember the sequence here. Our world goes on a lucky streak after Gavin Newsom wins the Recall effort and it rains, not only buckets of water on drought-starved California but in the space of two days it rains some thirteen inches in Oakville. There was flooding on a portion of the Silverado Trail in St. Helena but for the most part the earth drank that rain in faster than a dockworker drinks in his first beer. My lucky California hillside got so much rain that all of the overly-hardened dirt inbetween the rows and blocks of vines turned to soft loam again, especially the hillside where those busy critters had burrowed hundreds of tunnels in the hard tundra. Well, the water came down the hillside like a flash flood into those tunnels of Squirrel Town so fast that for a few seconds the water shot out of the lower escape routes like the Fountains of Bellagio. I have never seen quite a thing.
Squirrel Town collapsed, the squirrels split, the valley has been watered, and the owls still who-who every night. November is lovely in the vineyard. Thanks Governor!