Mr. Squirrel

"Hi! I'm Mr. Squirrel!"  Hello to you, squirrel!

Last week I had an intense, cheerful, and also deeply meaningful experience with the small squirrel that lives in a spectacular tree on the front lawn of "National Frat Boy Headquarters", which is across the street from the big yellow Dutch farmhouse where I currently reside. 

As I watched him comfortably groom his cutely small body parts high above my head (where he's smartly safe and sound), I thought it a great sign that squirrels are living and thriving in direct community with a group that's well-known for hazing, poor drinking habits, and other life-hindering skills like independent thought, because at the end of any given day, my new friend "Mr. Squirrel" does way more for the planet than those shaky, flabby rich kids will ever do, with much less harmful results. Boo! at you: http://genius.com/De-la-soul-tread-water-lyrics* (* https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=allegory).

A big "thumbs up" goes out today to all the happily productive squirrels in the 'hood: http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/02/nut-job.html. 

I'm your "Number One Fan" for life (!), as well as:  

• wily woodchucks with cheeks full of young grass shoots 
   http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/04/woodchuck-lives.html, 

• young bear cubs wrestling unmolested on their Bear Mountain
   http://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/rockland/ramapo/2015/04/22/ramapo-police-bear-video/26176665/, 

• wild city coyotes on the move for game 
  http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/coyotes-deserve-warmer-wildlife-biologist-article-1.2199378, 

and all of the thriving, healthy bird life throughout the tri-state are also always happily included.

A highly alert and intelligent life form does his thing undisturbed. Yes!

It's all connected, peeps. 

Get with it, and get in step with the universe! 

Nut Job!

What the...?!

Our town undertakers (Bluebell the Bulldog and Highway the Golden Retriever's dad and granddad) own several properties around town, the most dominating one being the large old brown and yellow house that plays host to families in their time of grief, with one spectacular oak tree growing resplendent in the front lawn, a visual symbol of our area's shared genetic history.

Naturally, it also plays host to an enormous variety of wildlife, including one very large bird of prey that is the young Peregrine Falcon, a murder of loud noisy crows, as well as many other types of birds, and the fattest, happiest bunch of squirrels I have ever seen. I think this place is "Heaven" for them, their only foes the birds flying around the treetop, but food scarcity is wholly unknown as a factor in their lives.

Ohh...the squirrel that just ran away unearthed his stash. Nice!

As a result, I spied with my eye one chubby little squirrel take advantage of last week's brief afternoon thaw to dig out his trench of buried nuts that ran in a neat orderly row in the soil between the sidewalk edge and the line of snow that's shoveled. That critter actually knows where the soft dirt demarcation line is in that tiny zone, and plans for it way in advance. Genius! 

$ucking brilliant, dude. Look at all these nuts!

Wintertime fatness in an animal is a sign that it has planned well for scarcity, not a small feat in this fiercely cold clime that we live in, and something amateur housewives of yore learned the long hard way, hence the abundance of glass Mason jars and canning artifacts known to this part of the country. Squirrel is winning at the "Game of Life", and I think it knows. I love you, fat bastard!

"Fat Bastard" is smarter than some people I know. Kudos, squirrel friend!

Nature: Hungry Squirrles and Intense Rabbits

Hankering for a hunk of Italian bread.

I was walking home from the library one afternoon to be startled by a squirrel with a huge hunk of Italian bread in its' mouth, dexterously climbing a bush's branches with it locked down in its' mouth. 

Intensely chewing and staring...at you!

I must have had extra special magnetic rays radiating out from me that day, because later on, the local bunny rabbit decided to stand right outside the window of the room where I stay, surprisingly intense in it's stare, chewing vigorously and intently looking at me with a gaze that didn't break after I walked across the room to take a picture. 

"A bird ran into my giant freak-head."

Sometimes having The Patron Saint of Animals (St. Francis) as your main "go-to guy" is a bit unnerving, like Elaine from Seinfeld's bird phobia, provoked by a kamikaze pigeon flight at her "big head" while walking through Central Park. Sometimes I need to dial my pheromones down a bit. What do you attract?

My wolf pack grew by two that day.