If any of you have read my book (if you haven’t, please buy 10 copies! The Washington Post called it “A lively and fascinating work of science writing!”) you will recognize F*%king Kevin. He’s a squirrel. He lives in my yard, and he owns all of my tomatoes.
I don’t know why, because it appears to be only my tomatoes that he wants. The neighbors are unaffected (thankfully, because I’ve got a four year old living next door, she’s very proud of her tomato plants, and if Kevin ever hurts that precious fairy child by eating her tomatoes so help me I’ll spread out birdseed coated in hot sauce). It’s just me. He broke through my first wooden frame with bird netting over it. Next, I replaced that with a professional gardeners’s cage, and he broke through that in a record setting 45 minutes, leading to not one, but TWO Kevins trapped in the cage bouncing like furry ping-pong balls (all squirrels in the yard are named Kevin, regardless of perceived sex, appearance, etc.). I thought it was gaps between the net and the frame, so I sewed it together. He chewed a hole right through the netting. I then added chicken wire around the base. Kevin dug under it, gleefully disregarding all of my ground staples. Finally, I lined the entire base of the structure in bricks, and Fortress Tomato yielded (most of) a full harvest.
But after the publication of the book I was pretty in charity with my own personal pest. I felt like I had learned his ways. I knew that if he didn’t know the tomatoes were there, he wouldn’t be after them again. And I DID get a book out of my blood, sweat and tomatoes. So this year, I set up the gardener’s cage as I planted my little seedlings. I knew that if he didn’t know they were there, he wouldn’t eat them.
The tomatoes grew tall, some topping 5 feet, and fruit began to emerge. I was elated. My brother and neighbors complained their tomatoes were struggling this year, but not mine! They were positively weighed down with fruit.
I pulled a small harvest, but one wasn’t quite ready. It was a big Purple Cherokee*, bigger than my fist. It just needed a few more days of sun, days that were already obligingly lined up on my weather app.
And then. Then I came home to this.
Kevin. My friend Lily noted that she’d never heard me sound so irritated. She has a point.
My beautiful tomato was, as you might imagine, no more.
I let him out of course, I’m not a monster. I had put up the cage and the chicken wire but I had NOT lined the base in bricks as before. Fortress Tomato is now intact again. But I saw them, this morning, perched on my compost bin. Plotting.
The failure was mine. I had learned his ways, but I had failed to account for the fact that squirrel location memories are legendary. They remember where they’ve buried nuts from year to year. So of course Kevin has learned that my tomatoes also appear, year after year, and all he has to do is get to them.
Squirrel lifespans are between six and seven years, so one might hope that once the first Kevin crosses the birdseed bridge the others would stay out. No dice. Squirrels, you see, display social learning. The OG Kevin is busily demonstrating to his fellows that my tomatoes are for the taking, and is also showing them techniques that worked in the past. Fortress Tomato is not going away any time soon. Because neither is Kevin.
Where have you been?
I hope it’s looking at this completely gorgeous fossil of a small mammal attacking a dinosaur. Meat’s back on the menu, boys.
Sorry the “lioness” on the loose in Germany was a boar. I know pareidolia is the tendency to see faces in things like toast, I wonder if we have a different tendency to see big scary animals where there are, in fact, mid-sized relatively non-scary animals, and if so, what’s the cool clinical name for it?
Speaking of boars, Sarah Everts is a glorious science beast and doused a stuffed anteater in human "pheromones" and left it in the forest. For SCIENCE. I am so jealous I didn't think of this.
And did you know that the Wimbledon courts remain pigeon-free because they are covered by a hawk patrol? Yes. His name is Rufus. Thank you Rufus, for your service.
Yes, it’s hot during the day, but it’s really hot at NIGHT too, and that’s dangerous, it places a lot of extra stress on the body. Be careful and stay cool. And fight climate change.
Where have I been?
Writing an explainer on domestication! I mean, sure that sounds like it’s easy, but honestly? It’s not. Domestication is not what you think it is. It’s not something we do to animals. It’s something animals also do to US. It takes two to tango, and two to domesticate.
*The number of plant names that are really kind of racist never fails to shock me, this is in fact a really tame example. They are PLANTS YOU CAN NAME THEM ANYTHING, COME ON.
A small piece of me admires Kevin, but a much larger piece of me feels all the rage when our Kevin (you know, Kevin's cousin, Kevin) takes a small bite out of a tomato, drops it on our front porch and then pees on said porch. Not the first thing I want to see when I walk out the door in the morning.
Putting out water for them, and talking to them like they’re your friends and whatnot will actually net you some cooperation, believe it or not. You can’t be too friendly so that they actually WANT your attention bc then they’re gonna be naughty to obtain it. But “safe person, don’t make mad” is a good relationship goal. Tomatoes and other fruit are an easy source of water. And satisfaction of curiosity. Hide your tracks when you make changes unless those changes are specifically for their enjoyment