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.
gray squirrel
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.
A dawn bright with snowlight, the storm a kind of theater in which the play consists of a thin white curtain falling and falling. As the temperature inches up, the flakes begin to fatten. A squirrel dashes to the end of a limb on its snow-free underside to pluck one of the last unfallen black walnuts.
Freezing fog that lifts after sunrise into a gray woolen sky, leaving frosted branches for the squirrels—gray or red, cautious or pell-mell.
Wind and clouds and the clattering of treetops rocking out of sync. Two squirrels hunting the last unfallen acorns keep climbing into the top branches of a big red oak, hanging by their hind legs to peel their prizes.
Sunrise delayed for a few minutes by a low bank of clouds. A gray squirrel emerges from its nest high in a black cherry and dashes down the newly exposed trunk. A robin adds a few tut-tuts to the chorus of white-throated sparrows.