Maple producers, like people in all vocations, can recount
events in their lines of work that can be complained of as
trouble or viewed as interesting happenstances, or be turned
into a good chuckle.  Pesky raccoons can account for many of
these stories, like pulling the bung from an oldie-time barrel
and dipping out what they could with a paw. They've been known
to unscrew a lid from jugs in a sugar house and even attempt to
take a jug out the door with them.  Most folks find baby animals
in the wild pretty cute. Take fawns for example. One producer in
Somerset County had to replace 200 of his 1,200 drop lines this
year because the fawns were using them as "teethers." Bears get
accused of just plain tearing down the lines and a row of
roosting wild turkeys can put a sag in your pipeline.   One
story about squirrels comes from a producer in the upper
Pennsylvania, lower New York area. The squirrels were nipping
off pieces of the drop lines and later they found a hollow tree
stuffed with little 2 and 3-inch pi