The warmest morning in weeks: less than ten degrees below freezing! White ground, gray sky, and from at least three directions, the sound of gnawing.
gray squirrel
A slow snowfall that never quite quits as I sit enjoying the balmy temperature—just seven degrees below freezing!—and the continuing, slow-motion courtship of the squirrels.
Three or four slow-moving squirrels crowd onto the big tulip tree. But there’s a loner 50 feet away, diving repeatedly into the snow as if unable to locate a buried nut. After a while, he retreats into the canopy to eat black birch seeds.
Cold and mostly gray. A gray squirrel at the end of the porch tries and fails to muster the courage to walk past me, approaching, retreating, studying me like the weather.
A cold, white expanse of sky with one small blaze off through the trees. It’s quiet. A squirrel chiseling a walnut shell is the loudest thing.
Unable to read due to flying snow, I start a collection of asterisks in my lap. When the wind dies, I can hear my mother yelling at the squirrels.
An hour past sunrise, the sun finally hits my porch. A gray squirrel is hectoring all and sundry about some long-gone hawk. The cardinal sings.
The warmest morning in weeks. Under a gray-wool sky, two gray squirrels climb slowly together up one of the tallest woods-edge trees—in the mood, it seems, for love.
A wedge of yellow light in the clouds for half an hour past sunrise. I’m learning to spot when a squirrel is about to dig up a nut: it stares off into space in one last effort to convince any watcher that it’s doing something entirely different.
A hole in the clouds at dawn fails to hold the whole full moon—a brief, bright searchlight. Later, at sunrise, a chorus of chiselers as gray squirrels work on their black walnuts.
Overcast and still. A squirrel running across the road drops the frozen walnut in her teeth, and it rolls along by itself for a few feet. Up on the ridge, a tree pops from the cold.
Well below freezing at sunrise. A pileated woodpecker drums as if it were already courtship season. Two squirrels briefly touch noses, then back away and resume solitary foraging.
An hour past sunrise, there’s a growing radiance as blue sky spreads in the west. Even after all these years of wildlife-watching, I can’t stop marvelling at the acrobatics and shenanigans of gray squirrels.
White ground and a white sky, with only the trees to keep them apart. The squirrels are still avoiding the snowy sides of limbs, except when they need a spot to sit and work on a nut.