LIBERTY U.S. flags vanish, and something nutty is afoot

Mary Eck believed that unpatriotic vandals were stealing her flags.
By TIM YOVICH
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
LIBERTY -- Mary Eck has been putting small American flags in the front yard of her Arbor Circle home since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Like so many other Americans, she wants to support this country and its military in the fight against terrorism.
After 9/11, Eck put out four small cloth flags attached to wooden sticks in her yard.
"They stayed up all winter. Nobody touched them," Eck said Monday.
Then in early May, she noticed the flags were gone. They had been taken overnight.
"Just the poles were sticking there," Eck said. "I thought there were vandals."
Undaunted, Eck, who has lived at her ranch-style home for 30 years, put two more flags in the front yard.
They, too, were stolen in mid-May.
"Now wait a minute. Whose stealing these flags?" she queried. "How unpatriotic."
So, concerned, Eck decided to call police in hopes they would check the neighborhood.
"We've never had any vandalism on this street. I was upset," she explained as she sat in the shade of a large oak in her back yard.
What neighbor saw
Eck wound up having a chat with her next-door neighbor, Sharon Blumental.
"Want to hear something funny?" her neighbor asked. "The squirrels are taking the flags."
Eck described how Blumental's husband, Josh, had seen the squirrels pulling the flags from their poles.
"I laughed so hard," Eck said. "Come on, a squirrel taking my flags?"
But her neighbor was right.
Saturday, a squirrel's nest fell from an oak tree in her front yard, landing on the concrete driveway. Among the leaves and twigs was one of her flags.
"They're patriotic squirrels," Eck said, laughing.
As for the other flags snatched from her yard, Eck said she has no doubt they're in the other nests high in the oaks that surround her house.
Now, Eck has a plastic flag in her front yard given to her by a neighbor.