Thin cloud, yet the sun’s still strong enough for leaf-glimmer and the shimmer of spider-silk strands already stringing tree to tree. A gray squirrel chases a red squirrel past my feet.
gray squirrel
Cold, clear, and still, with heavy frost silvering the yard. A red squirrel tries to get its nerve up to run past me, but fails and retreats to the garden, where it sits glaring at a gray squirrel under the lilac.
The sun glimmers through thin clouds and a murk of pollen, gathering strength as it clears the trees. A gray squirrel foraging on the ground dashes for cover at another squirrel’s “bird of prey” alarm. The bird of prey fails to materialize.
Foggy and warm. Two nuthatches at the woods’ edge tangle in mid-air, tumbling a dozen feet before retreating to separate tree trunks. Near the top of the big tulip tree, a gray squirrel is leaping from limb to limb.
In thick fog, the bright flesh of lilac and tulip tree limbs barked by squirrels for their nests. The last few patches of snow look as bedraggled as old bandages.
Flurries starting in fifteen minutes, says the weather app, and fifteen minutees later the air is full of flakes wandering this way and that, every bit as sentient as AI bots. By the time they stop half an hour later, I’m a snowman. A squirrel carrying a walnut walks right under my chair.
A gray sky gravid with rain. A gray squirrel pops out of a hole in the yard, walnut between its teeth. Up in the woods, a chipmunk zips across the snow.
Clear and still. A squirrel crouched in the lowest crotch of the closest black walnut tree works on her breakfast walnut, tail arched back into a headdress as spiky as the rising sun that sets it aglow.
No matter how I hold my book, snowflakes make their way onto the page. A hole in the clouds fills nearly to the brim with sun before emptying again. Up on the ridge, a squirrel’s alarm call ends as abruptly as it began.
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.
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.