Squirrels are a$$holes

I'm sorry if my title offends anyone, but I'm very annoyed with those red furry bastards right now. I've tolerated them eating my bird food for awhile, but they've crossed a line recently.

Last Sunday evening, I noticed this:

That's an empty hook where a suet feeder used to hang. This summer I've been making homemade seed cakes for the downy woodpeckers and putting them in the suet feeders. When I mentioned the missing feeder to D, he said he'd seen a squirrel hanging on the feeder, pulling the food out. I assumed the feeder was laying on the ground, but when I finally went outside to find it, it was nowhere to be found. One week later and I still haven't found it. One of my neighbors is going to find that thing in their yard and wonder where the heck it came from.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the nasty squirrels are destroying my sunflowers. The volunteer that grew underneath the bird feeder looks like this:

Then there's my beautiful eight foot tall sunflower, growing in the cinder block garden.

It was lovely, until someone did this:

I know the picture is out of focus. My poor camera had nothing to focus on because a nasty squirrel chewed the flower off the top of the stalk! When I first noticed this, I saw the flower laying on the ground. The next day, all that was left was this:

Squirrels are dirty rats, and I'm thinking about getting a slingshot.