Tree Rat Update

The last two months have been an active storm season for us: storms being in the form of allegedly "cute" Grey Squirrels. We've absorbed the assaults of a number of animals on all of the sunflower seed feeders. While I have not yet established how many animals are involved (I have seen at least four at one time) it appears the tide may be turning. Sunflower seed consumption has dropped from "unbelievably bad" to "very bad." Am I getting luckier? The usual forms of squirrel diminishment (automobiles, hawks, disease, old age) are not clearly in evidence. It is possible the weaker and more marginal rats are being driven out or even killed by the alphas, but again I am not seeing clear evidence of this. There is really only one way to tell, and that's for me to get serious about my mad scientist-like plan to trap and color code individual animals to see who's around and when. My long-suffering spouse rolls her eyes at this idea, but a true naturalist must be willing to collect the data, whatever it takes short of blasting them out of the trees. And this is the same spouse who showed me an ad for something called the "Scram Patrol Sonic Animal Chaser!" (That's on my list, incidentally.) In conclusion: (a) rats are less bothersome by a few percentage points, (b) I have done nothing to bring that about, and (c) data collection is well overdue.