Clear at sunrise, and just two degrees below freezing. A squirrel in the treetops touches its snout to the light’s leading edge.
gray squirrel
The close sweep of a woodpecker’s wings sets off a squirrel, who scolds for ten minutes until a male cardinal appears, red as a stop sign.
In the steady rain, a squirrel grabs an unburied black walnut from under the walnut-stained slush and carries it back up the tree.
A couple degrees above freezing. The snowpack has softened, and the squirrels chasing back and forth through the laurel hardly make a sound.
A squirrel foraging in the leaves suddenly streaks for the nearest tree, barely escaping the sharp-shinned hawk hurtling through the forest.
A tulip poplar key helicopters past the porch, shook loose by a squirrel at the edge of the woods rummaging among the spikey cups of seeds.
Cold and quiet, except for the sound of incisors chiseling a bone-hard walnut and the wind hissing through scattered marcescent leaves.
A squirrel places a walnut in a small high crotch in the lilac and departs, like the Andrew Goldsworthy of squirrels. A junco lands, looks.
The whining scold-calls of squirrels, agitation of chipmunks, denunciation of a crow: soundtrack for a gray morning with one white hawk.
Two gray squirrels in their fall colors—snouts and bellies stained brown from walnut hulls—dash past each other on the rain-slick trunk.
Pieces of walnut husk plop onto the driveway. A yellow leaf trapped by caterpillar silk flops like a fish a foot above the fishless stream.
I glance up from my reading to meet the sun’s bleary eye. A squirrel bent into a ball, dangling tail curled left, pauses—a semicolon pose.
Every overcast morning is overcast in its own way. This one’s dull and slow, a gray squirrel on a small dead tree licking its genitals.
A squirrel emerges from the springhouse’s tiny attic vent and slides head-first toward the ground. A patch of sun shimmers in the goldenrod.