(WPDE) — It started like many squirrel stories…with a nut. “We would go sit out in the front yard under the live oak tree and the squirrels would be around,” John Fesler said. “So we started getting a few unsalted peanuts and we would toss them to the squirrels.” As Fesler, a ‘Squirrel Whisperer,’ you might say, and his wife Jo spent more time around the animals, they took a chance to see just how close they’d come. “Jo came up with the idea,” Fesler said. “She said well let’s just put one on the shoe and see what happens. And one came up, took it, and it just kind of exploded from there where they would come up to us, and they started taking them out of our hands.” Five years later, you can see squirrels all over John and Jo’s Myrtle Beach yard… But you can also see them from your home, on your phone. “Our daughter said ‘You’ve got such cool stuff, you need to start an Instagram page,’ and we basically said ‘What’s Instagram?'” The Feslers are now quite familiar with Instagram. Their Beryl the Squirrel account, named after one of the first squirrels to appear in their videos, has more than 100 thousand followers, with hundreds of millions of views. “We started getting a few followers and we said ‘Wow, maybe we’ll get a hundred followers,'” Fesler said. “It just kind of grew from there.” The cast of starring squirrels is always revolving. The current crew includes a mainstay mom, named Flash. “She zig-zags around all over the place,” Fesler said. “She literally controls that tree and that deck. She chases other ones away and says ‘This is my deck, this is mine.'” Being a celebrity comes with a few perks for Flash…including her own custom squirrel house, one of seven in the Fesler’s yard. All come hooked up with Ring video cameras to capture the action for Instagram. The squirrels themselves are as unique as their various houses. “They actually have their own little personalities,” Fesler said. John and Jo recently started rehabbing baby squirrels in need, using a modified cat house…recently raising five to health, who’ve decided to stick around. “We have Sago, Coco, and Palmer,” Fesler said. “Then the two other ones that came from another tree that were rescues, they’re about a week younger than those, and those are named Bella and Ukey.” Why would the squirrels decide to stick around the Fesler’s backyard when they’ve now got the whole world to explore? You can say they’ve got a bond, born from a labor of love. “It’s about a three month or so process,” Fesler said of rehabbing the squirrels. “Cause when we got ’em, they were tiny babies. About as big as your thumb, very small, and you have to hand feed them 2 a.m., 5 a.m., every couple hours when they’re that small. It’s pretty involved when they’re tiny babies.” If you can believe it, their commitment to these animals is now helping squirrels across the globe! “We got contacted from somebody from South Africa that ran a rehab in South Africa,” Fesler said. “They said we just love your videos and we use them to train our new rehab people so they can understand the behind the scenes of how squirrels and other animals live.” A life in retirement spent as a Squirrel Whisperer. You might call it nuts… Fesler’s got another word for it. “It’s just a lot of fun,” he said. “It really is.” Categories: News, State