Everyone loves Candy Corn!

Candied Corn doesn’t have a great deal of nutritional value … but don’t try telling that to your kids – or your furry friends!

Oh, I don’t mean the horrible pure-sugar vaguely corn-shaped candies that are a staple for many American kids at Halloween.

I mean real corn, sweetened with honey or caramel or powdered sugar .. sometimes called Caramel Corn, or Kettle Corn, or (in Australia) Lolly-Gobble Bliss-Bombs.

We were at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles recently and someone had left a plastic tub half full of the yummy treat on a picnic table.

But they’d resealed the container. And it was fascinating to see first a local crow, and then a squirrel, try to extract said treat. Without success.

What made it especially poignant was that the squirrel was about 30 metres away from us,trying to liberate a meal from the hard plastic shell. But the clear container proved to be a trick, promising a feed and yet … nothing.

And in the opposite direction, again about 30 metres away, was a pool of bubbling tar which over the millennia has proved to be another meal-time trick.

It would trap animals in its bituminous grasp – and others, thinking the captured creatures would be easy pickings, fell into the same deadly miasma.

Our squirrel friend here didn’t fall prey to the tar-pits (although I did see it scurrying around the edges earlier).

Bit it also had no luck with the candied corn, either. Or at least not while we were watching. But given enough time, who knows?

After all, nature will have her way, eventually 🙂