You have to watch this hilarious video of a pair of red squirrels fighting.
My favorite bit is around 0:06, check out how the squirrel in the back gets into this stiff feet-sideways penguin like stance and does like a little moonwalk before lunging at the other squirrel.
The funniest thing though is how they still manage to fit in 1 second of eating for every 10 seconds of fighting.
It was a beautiful spring day today at the nutsaboutsquirrels headquarters and even though we didn’t see it, we know there was a baby squirrel out there enjoying the sun too.
We didn’t see him but we heard him.
Baby squirrels make a distinctive call, you may have heard one already but thought it was a bird.
See this video for an example of a baby fox squirrel calling for its mother.
The eastern grey squirrel makes a similar call, and the younger they are, the higher the pitch.
One time I brought in an orphan to be rehabbed and he called like this in the cab on the way. It was really piercing: high pitched and loud!
I think the cab driver was glad to get rid of us.
So we know the spring babies are out there now.
I guess they’ll be showing up on the back porch pretty soon. Be sure to check back later—we’ll post pictures.
If we could just get nine other squirrels to stand like this in a triangle formation then we could get a game going!
Also this picture shows how I know that this squirrel is nursing a litter right now.
The Ottawa Citizen published this article on the eastern grey squirrel.
Despite the subhead that blames squirrels for damaging attics and electrical wires and calls them “pests,” the article had lots information on the history of this species.
For example, the article claims that the grey squirrel which is so common in Canadian cities today was actually rare in the early 20th century, so much so that a sighting of one in Toronto in 1901 caused people to go on safari to the “sleepy backwater of Leaside” in the hopes of spotting the animal again.
The article notes that in the city squirrels have few predators, other than cars, and the accompanying photo gallery of a grey squirrel retrieving hamburgers and fries from a trash suggests that they find many feeding opportunities in the city.
I would bet that one acre of urban land can support a lot more grey squirrels than one acre of hardwood forest, which is their original habitat.
The site kentucky.com has a cute photo gallery of a squirrel pulling a whole fast food meal out of a trash can.
I like the picture where he’s trying to push the trash can lid up with a whole hamburger bun in his mouth. He’s all like: “Enh! enh! Who designs these food dispensers! Why can’t they have automatic doors!”
Really go see for yourself. It’s cute.
