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.
gray squirrel
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.
Clouds gather in the east, glowing brightly as they smother the sun. A west-bound freight rumbles through the gap. Bits of walnut shell rain down from a squirrel’s breakfast.
Heavy frost in the yard. A few, faint clouds disappear after sunrise, as squirrels climb high into the wine-red crowns of oaks.
Gray skies with a bitter wind. Colored leaves fly past. A pair of gray squirrels meet on the trunk of a black locust and touch snouts.
Bright periods alternate with gloom on a cool, cloudy morning, with an intermittent breeze paging through the tulip tree leaves. A sound like the clacking of a typewriter as a squirrel trots across the metal roof overhead.
Steady rain from heavy clouds, with the seeming glow of orange and yellow leaves in lieu of a sunrise. A drenched gray squirrel beside the porch peers up at the sky.
Cloudy and cold at mid-morning. The high lisp of a brown creeper at the woods’ edge. In the distance, a gray squirrel is airing a complaint about a hawk.