New England bulb planters responded ensemble to the news last week that a restaurant in Cumbria, England, is serving free canapés of gray squirrel.

"Please," we all begged from backyards, "take ours."

You've heard, no doubt, that The Famous Wild Boar Hotel is turning squirrels trapped on the grounds into wrap-style hors d'oeuvres.

People like them. They supposedly taste like rabbit.

But then, most of us will eat anything that someone else cooks. Just as gray squirrels will eat anything that someone else plants.

Like Dutch tulips.

Gray squirrels are an invader nuisance in the UK. They're competing with the indigenous red squirrel for food and territory, prompting the birth of earnest groups such as The Red Squirrel Protection Partnership.

Its Web site, with a quaint squirrel chatroom, offers highly alarming stats: "Without your support, red squirrels will be extinct in Northumberland within 10 years, 4,678 Grey Squirrels trapped since January."

A whole lot of canapés.

Which seems like a really good idea from the vantage of muttering New England gardeners on their knees next to pyramids of Salmon Parrot and Lipgloss tulips, trowels, rakes and bone meal products, mothballs, old newspaper, chicken wire and vials of coyote urine.

Recently visited a big local plant nursery, seeking daffodil bulbs (to squirrels as repellant as transfats to Paris Hilton), narcissus, alium, tulips and advice. The joint stocks deterrents that purportedly smell so bad they'd likely scare off squirrels but, my thought was, might also scare off neighbors.

What about wrapping each bulb in steel wool? That was a new one on staff, sympathetic but unwilling to place bets on the notion.

"Nope, never heard of that."

New Englanders spend the greater portion of lifetimes pursuing ways to outfox the gray squirrel. We patch attic holes, engage ultrasonics, swab birdfeeder poles with Mazola, douse tree stumps with citronella oil, shoo squirrels from car engines and their feastings on battery wire insulation. Turn around, you're old, a lifetime squandered.

It's the same old story this autumn. Double tulip bulbs planted, already pillaged. It's a little like giving birth with no epidural. You forget what it was like, au natural, and do it all over again the next year.

A web search yielded the information from Access Excellence that ground squirrels living in the Northern plains of North American have been found to emit screams in the ultrasonic range to warn others of their kind of oncoming danger.

Such as an inventive chef.

But no one, absolutely no one, yells as loudly as a fall bulb gardener who leaves the house unguarded for an hour to buy gas and groceries and returns to a lawn pockmarked by thieves.

CANAPES ANYONE?

BETSY SHEA-TAYLOR, a former editor and writer for The Sun Chronicle, is a freelance writer. she can be reached at prosewing@aol.com