The sign


Let’s kick this squirrel blog off with the first story. I was doing some initial tests with the squirrels, the camera and a sign. I had just said goodbye to a friend visiting from Berlin and I had just told him about the squirrel project. The last thing he said to me was “say hello to the squirrels”. I thought it would be fun to extend the greeting to the squirrels. I made the base of the sign out of hazel nuts to make sure that the squirrels would go crazy with the sign. It worked out really well. I have had the camera recording for a while when I looked out on the balcony to catch a squirrel taking off with the sign in it’s mouth.

I watched the recording and noticed that the sign wasn’t that great. It was a bit small and the white background caused the camera to overexpose. I uploaded the video to a test account on Youtube but never never made any effort to spread the clip to the public, I only showed it to a few family members. After 7 views on Youtube I was pretty surprised to receive a comment from a stranger, someone called “Vivyan Fable” (what a suiting name, right?). This Vivyan claimed to have found the sign I had made for the squirrels. I found it both odd and funny and tired to call her bluff by telling her to email me some proof.

Not many days later I got proof in the mail box. Now this was getting interesting. Either this was someone in my neighborhood who was playing me a prank or this was someone with way too much time on her hands that had made a replica of my sign. I started comparing the video footage to the images to see if it really was my sign. It was a very basic sign, black text set in Courier against a white background, very easy to copy. I looked at how the nuts were shaped and how the sign was attached to the toothpicks and decided that this sign was fake.

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2,219 Responses to The sign

  1. vivyan says:

    Hi Squirrels! Let me tell you my side of the story: a sunny Saturday when I´d just come back from the US, a bit tired and jetlagged and opened the balcony door in the apartment, I found the sign. It was placed so precisely between the junction of the the windowsill and the balcony rail that no wind could have removed it!!! And than I knew that someone was here… I contacted immediately the guy I rented the apartment from because he told that he would drop in while I was in the US so I thought that it was him. Anyway, I contacted him and asked if he was here. “No”- he said. “OK, look,” I said “I got a message which says that Squirrels, Ilan&Tinet says hi!” He said that he didn´t know that the suirrels could write. I got very pissed off and my paranoia started to grow. Finally he came up with some possible explanations:
    1. someone was hanging down that sign with a help of a rod and placed it there
    2. a squirrel found a sign and ran away with it and placed it there
    He also found the video on Youtube.
    I became even more pissed off and asked back what the likelihood was that such a thing would happen and than I went to bed.
    Next day I was much more positive after sleeping 15 hours and checked out the video and I realized that the balcony was the same as mine, though different colour (green) and I checked the neighbouring balconies and found out that one next to me is a green one. And I wrote a message. And I got a reply. And the mystery was solved.

  2. Squirrel No 1 says:

    We just love-love-love this post. Nutty neighbors.

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