Just try keeping a squirrel away from pumpkins

Squirrels are skipping the turkey dinner and going straight for the pumpkin pie.

On porches, patios and front stoops across the Twin Cities, the bushy-tailed rodents are gnawing the eyes of carved pumpkins or chewing their own designs in yet-to-be carved ones to get to the meat and seeds.

"They're equal-opportunity pumpkin warriors," said Diana Yamamoto, who works at Gertens in Inver Grove Heights.

Yamamoto has tried lots of methods to stop them. Most garden centers carry repellents that stick to the surface of pumpkin. Unfortunately, they often smell like garlic or rotten eggs. Some of Yamamoto's customers have had luck with using hair spray, but her go-to repellent is spraying pumpkins with transparent Rust-Oleum. If that doesn't work, she tries a bait-and-switch: setting out baskets of ears of corn in her yard to lure squirrels away from her pumpkins.

Sorry, but there's no 100 percent solution, said Sharon Jansa, mammal curator at the Bell Museum of Natural History in Minneapolis. "We're putting out tempting pumpkins when food sources are dwindling for squirrels," she said.

Gray squirrels, the most common species in the Twin Cities, live off stored fat in the winter and "bury pumpkin seeds for a snack in the spring," she said.

Jansa's solution is to put pumpkins where the squirrels can't get them.

"Squirrels are wily and clever." Worse, she said, is that "they're decent problem-solvers when food is involved." □