Here are some of the other residents that share the backyard with our squirrels.
A big butterfly in our lilac bush. Species unknown.
One of the horrible black beetles who are helping the raccoons to destroy our lawn.
Every year in June, these inch and a half long beetles emerge from the ground at dusk driven by god knows what repulsive instinct. They fight each other for mates, then lay eggs that develop into grubs that chew at the roots of the grass. This attracts raccoons and skunks that dig up the turf and decimate the lawn.
Isn’t the circle of life wonderful?
And here we have a really neat sighting of a ‘Nessus sphinx’ moth (Amphion floridensis)
This moth looks and behaves like a hummingbird. It spent the evening hovering and sipping nectar from our lilac bush.
This squirrel has become semi legendary here at nutsaboutsquirrels.
This squirrel is not easy to approach and has an unusually large territory.
The first few times I spotted her in the yard of a corner house about two blocks from ours. After that I started spotting her everywhere over a four by four block radius.
She has been around since at least 2008, maybe earlier. She will occasionally visit our yard, but not on a regular basis.
This squirrel is completely heedless of traffic. She has been seen crossing the street, changing her mind, then crossing right back. She sometimes runs lengthwise down the street.
Because there can be long stretches between sightings, I always find it satisfying when I spot her again and realize that she is still around. She has become one of those fixtures of the neighbourhood that provides a sense of continuity.
Lately though, we have been seeing her on a more regular basis, so maybe we’ll get some better pictures of her.
Picture yourself on a warm summer’s day, sitting in the grass in the shade of a beautiful oak tree and listening to the rustle of the leaves.
Does this scene appeal to you? Then you may want to thank a squirrel.
The majority of hardwood trees that aren’t planted by humans are planted by squirrels.
An acorn from an oak tree can’t sprout if it’s just lying on the ground. It has to be buried in the soil.
Every fall in an oak forest, the trees produce thousands of acorns that fall to the ground. The squirrels then get busy burying them in the ground for the winter.
Unlike a chipmunk, which will cache nuts in a single place— its burrow. Grey squirrels (and fox squirrels) are “scatter hoarders.”
These squirrels will bury nuts in hundreds of different locations, and research has shown that they use their amazing memory to locate them later.
Even though squirrels can remember the location of hundreds of cached nuts, inevitably a few acorns will be forgotten and will sprout into the next generation of oak trees.
This ensures the renewal of the forest, and the very trees the squirrels depend on.
My friend Scott Waters is as skillful with a mountain bike as he is with a paintbrush and though he likes guns and rodents, he probably wouldn’t approve of using guns on rodents.
With that non-sequitur in mind, know that Scott and Willy headed out to High Park in Toronto armed only with a bagful of peanuts to see what would happen.
As has been re-confirmed by numerous unscientific, but very fun studies: squirrels like peanuts. Willy draws a squirrel in.
At this point Scott and Willy are still blissfully unaware of what the squirrel will do:
The squirrel comes in closer:
And closer:
And, now breaking with narrative convention, the tension will not be broken by some surprising event. Unless of course you would be surprised to find out that chipmunks are also a type of squirrel and that they like peanuts too:
Look at the difference in the size of Willy’s and the chipmunk’s little pawsy hands.
This one just got whacked on the head by a big cartoon wood mallet:
All photos are © Scott Waters
