An eight-year squirrel-feeding habit is about to land a Conmee Street man in court.
Stanley Mysliwiec this week received a summons from police to respond to charges he ignored a Feb. 2 City of Thunder Bay bylaw order demanding he stop feeding the squirrels and chipmunks that flock to his peanut-shell laden backyard. He's expected to appear in the Ontario Court of Justice on March 28.
Mysliwiec who moved into the quiet north-side neighbourhood about 10 years ago, said he was shocked earlier this week to find an officer on his front porch with summons in hand.
But it’s something he’s prepared to deal with.
“It is a little bit stressful, but I’m used to going to traffic court and fighting for my rights,” said Mysliwiec, who once raised an abandoned baby squirrel in his basement after finding it stranded in his garage.
It wasn’t until two years after he moved into his bungalow-style home that the squirrels began to appear. Being a nature lover who spent his working days in the bush, he started buying peanuts and feeding them.
That’s when the problems began.
“A few years after that the neighbour said that feeding the squirrels brought squirrels into his yard and he was scared they would get up into his eaves trough and stop his drainage system or something,” Mysliwiec said.
“I said, ‘Squirrels aren’t that stupid.’ So I just kept feeding them.”
Ultimately the neighbour, who was unavailable for comment Friday morning, called on the city to solve the dispute.
It led to a city bylaw enforcement officer paying Mysliwiec a visit, questioning the amount of peanut shells littering his yard and suggesting the rodents might be being overfed, he said.
“The next thing you know the health department came to see if there was anything unhealthy in my yard, that everything was good. They said it’s a nice clean yard and there are no issues and they left.”
A month ago, according to Mysliwiec, a bylaw officer was back in his neighbour’s yard, taking pictures of the trees and the house he built on the back of his garage for the squirrels to live in.
The summons comes in the wake of the city’s controversial anti-wildlife feeding bylaw that specifically targets ducks, geese, seagulls and deer.
Asked specifically about squirrels and other woodland critters that regularly come begging for food in Thunder Bay, city licensing and enforcement manager Ron Bourret on March 2 said the new bylaw was not meant to deal with them.
That doesn’t mean neighbours are left without recourse, he said.
“If we do receive other types of wildlife complaints which are causing a nuisance to a neighbour, we can deal with the smaller critters using our property standards bylaw,” Bourret said.
“The complainant at the end of the day would have to attend court, if it got to that level, to explain to the judge how the feeding of a squirrel by a neighbour is impacting his or her lifestyle.”
Development services manager Mark Smith said this case is not associated with the new bylaw in any way, shape or form.
"This case stems back literally years," he said, reached by phone. "It's the city responding to complaints from neighbours."
