Background: Lots of bungalows were built with a pantry feature I've heard called a "California cooler." It's a closet on the exterior wall with two screened apertures at top and bottom, through the exterior wall to the outside, and the shelves ("Shelves in a closet! Happy thought!") are slatted for air circulation.
When I returned from grocery-shopping today, I called my parents to confirm their arrival time. I was on the phone with my notstepmother when I opened the pantry door and saw the nearly new tin of cocoa powder spilled on the floor. I had just made cookies the night before and figured I hadn't set the tin squarely on the shelf. A few minutes later, when my notstepmother had handed the phone off to my father, I wandered back into the kitchen and looked at the spill more closely: the plastic lid hadn't burst off on impact but had been chewed through. I got off the phone fast.
First, was the squirrel still in the house? The absence of little chocolate footprints leading away from the scene of the crime let me hope not. Plus, the door was closed, though not on the latch. The powder was all over the pantry floor, but not much on the kitchen floor. That was good.
I called Scarf and Drums, asking to borrow Mia, and when I got to their house, Drums came back with me, Mia, and a squirrel cage. Mia assessed the house and found it free of rodents, and then the three of us went outside where Drums and I measured the lower aperture. I set up the extension ladder while he and the dog went home to cut a square of wood cut exactly the right size, and he even screwed it into place with a drill.
So as squirrel attacks go, it wasn't bad. I should have realized a squirrel was burrowing into the house, because over the few weeks before, I had noticed a lot of dirt on the containers on the top shelf. I noticed that the canvas or whatever material someone had used to close the opening (once only screened) was bent or torn, but even that didn't activate the squirrel-light in my brain. If I hadn't been able to borrow a carpenter as well as a dog, I would have filled the tunnel with bricks (the exterior wall is two sailor-bricks wide, but the aperture isn't stretcher-brick wide) to protect the house (do squirrels eat cockatiels? threaten cockatiels? mock their manliness or in any way mar their happiness?) while I scurried off to buy my own bit of wood. Then I would have wondered if I might affix the wood to the wooden trim of the aperture without first painting it white (like the rest of the house's trim) and without the approval of the house foreman (despite his absence from the country). Plus I would have nailed it crooked rather than screwed in on straight.
As it was, I emptied the entire pantry of food and shelves, ditched all the open food--it had chewed into the cannister of oats as well--ran all the containers (the floor is Tupperware territory) through the dishwasher (cocoa powder and possible squirrel pee), and still made it to the party I was aiming for. The bottom aperture already has a wooden cover, and both need to be sealed on both inside and outside, and maybe with alumninum in addition to plywood.
And I shouldn't say "it." I am sure it was the little female who regularly perches on the dining room windowsill and peeps into the house in a brazenly cute way: first, because she's evidently fearless; and second, because the first food she attacked was not the oats in their more vulnerable cardboard canister but the redolently tempting tin of Ghirardelli cocoa powder with its plastic lid.