In UD‘s recent squirrels-at-universities post,
she forgot to mention squirrel fishing.
The sport originated, according to a number of
sources, at Harvard, where students attached
nuts to fishing poles and, as squirrels grabbed
onto the food, lifted the squirrels off the ground.
(See this primer and film.)
UD‘s very attracted to the idea of squirrel
fishing. There’s a sweetness and an
inventiveness here. You need very little
equipment. Squirrels are plentiful everywhere.
No one gets hurt. Competition is keen,
and there’s lots of room for strategy (type
of nut, placement, timing once the squirrel
locks on, etc.). Squirrels disrupt our lives
in countless ways, and this feels like an
innocuous form of revenge.
Wherever it originated, it seems most
prominent at the moment at Berkeley.
March 6th, 2010 at 8:42AM
You won’t be laughing when they inflict their revenge by taking one bite out of every tomato on your plants this summer.
March 6th, 2010 at 9:10AM
They do that every summer.
March 8th, 2010 at 9:35AM
The craze has spread to the UK where they use bigger bait.
March 8th, 2010 at 7:30PM
I finally got around to opening the link, tp.
Laughing hard.