Airborne Ground Squirrel

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We have two species of squirrel in our garden here in Thailand, the grey-bellied squirrel, which does everything it can to avoid setting a foot on the ground, and the Indochinese ground squirrel, which, as it's name suggests, spends most of its time scampering around at ground-level. However, the ground squirrels do climb upwards to nest in trees or buildings and also, given what I have witnessed recently, to store food.

I have an old compost bucket that I drain water through to make compost tea for any plants that look like they could do with a boost. Currently, it is full of mango seeds from the wonderful crop of little mangoes we had a few months back. Our local ground squirrels have been raiding this bucket and taking the seeds away to gnaw out the nourishment. They are slowly working their way through the bucket but there are still plenty of seeds left.

Recently I noticed that rather than sit down somewhere nearby to nibble a stolen seed as usually happens, sometimes a squirrel carries it off elsewhere. A little bit of snooping around and I found that they were climbing onto the roof of an outbuilding and from there leaping across onto the house roof. As you can see in the photos, a while back I put up some netting to try to prevent either species of squirrel doing this as I didn't want them getting into our roofspace. It worked for a while but then the squirrels found they could jump onto the netting and climb over it. Doing this then pulled the net down just enough that with effort they can just leap over the net in one bound. It's quite impressive to watch, and these flying squirrels are making a mockery of their usual reputation of staying on the ground. I haven't gotten around to finding a better barrier system to keep them off the roof yet.

The squirrels already have recent young with them and I'm pretty sure they are not going up there to raise another brood yet so I suspect they are storing the mango seeds somewhere in our roofspace for leaner times.

With effort I managed to find the hole that they have chewed to actually get into the roofspace but the nature of the construction makes it impossible for me to find their store from the inside. This hole is in an awkward place but I managed to wedge a camera nearby but never caught any squirrels using it, only a gecko!

I now worry that if I do manage to stop the squirrels getting onto (and into) our roof, we might find we get mango trees sprouting out between the tiles!