Gracie is one of my most co-operative subjects right now.
Here is a shot of her taken on May 6.
Look at those crumbs all over the place. She’s a messy eater!
We all know that squirrels bury nuts in the ground for safe keeping, but how do they retrieve them later?
Do they rely on their sense of smell to find them, or do they rely on their memory?
Watch this video and find out:
Some of the local squirrels have figured out that they can get our attention by hanging onto the screen door and shaking it as loudly as they can.
This makes so much noise that it can be heard throughout the house.
If we try and ignore them, they put their whole body into it and rattle even louder.
Once this starts, the only way to deal with it is to either feed them, or close the blinds.
[Photo credit for image of gargoyle at Mausoleum for Queen Louise-Marie; Sint-Petrus-en-Pauluskerk; Ostend, Belgium, taken by Georges Jansoone 13 June 2005, Wikimedia Commons]
Sir David Attenborough, narrator of the epic Planet Earth series and literally countless other nature documentaries, who has seen the elusive blue whale from a helicopter, stalked the bird of paradise in New Guinea and spent time with tool making chimps, is not above turning his attention on the lowly squirrel.
This clip, for example, about a grey squirrel raising her young, despite using a misplaced martial metaphor, has great footage of her building her nest and then raising her young in it.
This clip where Attenborough travels to Olney Illinois, the white squirrel capital of the world has a slightly creepy vibe to it. (“We’re all quite mad here, mad I say…”)
This clip on flying squirrels, which has amazing in-flight footage of squirrels gliding hundreds of feet from tree to tree, shows the obvious delight Attenborough takes in our favorite rodents.
In my opinion these are worth watching just to hear him say “squirrel.” He doesn’t say it “skwarl” like us one-toothed hillbilly North Americans, but rather picks out every syllable with precision.
I’m going to have to take elocution lessons.
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