Pull up a chair. We are not walking today but looking out of my window, something I was forced to do most of last week since I had to navigate the consequences of a fall. (All good now, no worries.)

I resumed photographing the squirrels on my balcony. When you stare out of the windows for hours at a time you can eventually identify a cast of characters by their distinct markings. By now we are on a first name basis.

Meet Fire Ear, my favorite, since s/he’s fearless, happy to look me straight in the eye and defiantly pees into my flowerpot during visits. Every single time.

Then there’s Mohawk, whose tail is either fashionably barbered or the proud emblem of victory in a previous fight.

Nipped Ear has obviously been victorious as well, and is aggressively defending his position at the peanuts when other squirrels arrive.

Red dot is the leanest of them all and shy,

Butterball only appears when the big guys have had their share,

and occasionally there’s an enterprising Baby.

The word squirrel is Greek in origin: it comes from skiouros, from skia, meaning “shadow,” and oura, meaning “tail.” When they sit up and move their tail straight one could think of it as a bit of an umbrella, I guess.

There are a whopping 200 species across the world, all born altricial, or completely dependent on their mothers for the first three months of their lives. They hoard food in caches for lean times, able to dig up stuff even under a foot of snow. Some 25% of those stores are lost to raiders, some are never dug up, which in turn helps to grow new trees, in theory. Not in my flowerpots, where nuts disappear en masse.

They are crepuscular, that is most active at dusk and dawn, so they can hang out when it gets hot during the middle of the day. They also sport hyper mobility (they can rotate their ankles by 180 degrees,) which allows them to climb in amazing ways, with forearms stretching, while the backless are anchored to the tree limbs. Oh, and their teeth never stop growing. Good thing, too when your perennially wear them down on hard nuts.

It brings me such joy to watch them, prohibitions to feed them close to the house (they might start nesting in the rafters) be d-mned. The poem below could not be more apt.

Here is a field recording of Squirrel Flower – longtime readers might remember the location, deCordova sculpture park in MA, I wrote about it here.