I was really hoping to find out “turnabout is fair play” was coined by William Shakespeare. Alas, its earliest application may be lost to history, but Abraham Lincoln was an early user of the phrase, so we’ll keep it in play with today’s story.

As you may recall, my father‘s entire life of home ownership was tortured by squirrels (see Nuts to you! from 2019). He and Mom loved to feed the birds in their many backyards, from Massachusetts to Indiana to Connecticut.

Here’s a sweet poem Mom wrote when she was ten years old:

Mom and Dad didn’t, however, love to see squirrels run rampant among the beauty of nature, gobbling up the birdseed.

Farmer Gary is not a fan of marauding squirrels, either. And so, last Christmas, son James presented him with a squirrel feeder for our backyard. (He also gifted to his father a Squirrelzilla shirt; the generational teasing continues.)

In late January of 2025, grandson Cameron helped Gary assemble the feeder. They filled it with peanuts.

They’d carefully chosen a particular tree from which to hang the feeder, so that Gary and I could see all the action from our perches in the sunroom.

For this to work, the feeder had to swing from a branch more than a dozen feet off the ground.

Cam was up to the task. He and Gary discussed pulleys and figured out how to tie off the rig so the feeder could be easily lowered to the ground to be refilled.

… because that would no doubt happen a lot. The squirrels were going to love this feeder, right?

Well … not exactly.

Over the course of an entire year, we never saw a single squirrel at that feeder. It’s as if their Connecticut kin had messaged them to torment us, just to keep up the tradition.

James asked us occasionally when he called home. Cam took a look when he came up for an overnight. Shaking our heads, we reported that squirrels ran up and down that tree and the neighboring trees, but somehow never poked their little heads inside the feeder.

That is, until today.

A full 54 weeks after the feeder was launched, some fine dining finally took place.

But it wasn’t a squirrel. It was a bird. A blue jay.

Twice, the blue jay grabbed a peanut and hopped over to a nearby branch. It pecked at the shell and had a good meal.

We couldn’t believe it! At long last, the squirrel feeder was serving its purpose.

Only it was for a bird, not a squirrel. In this case, “turnabout is fair play” must be credited to a lovely blue jay.

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“Bird” ©1940 Joan Cassidy Vayo. All rights reserved.

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