[photolady95]

My squirrels don't build nests in trees as in holes in trees. They create a nest like most birds do, leaves and twigs, interwoven, and place on top of a limb or spanned between two limbs in the crook of those limbs. And babies aren't seen until they're older. I've only seen one baby squirrel and that was because he fell out of the nest. We're not allowed to keep wild animals, so he was taken to an animal rescue place.

[aslyfox]

hey mac,

how come you keep coming closer

[reh321]

My squirrels don't build nests in trees as in holes in trees. They create a nest like most birds do, leaves and twigs, interwoven, and place on top of a limb or spanned between two limbs in the crook of those limbs. And babies aren't seen until they're older. I've only seen one baby squirrel and that was because he fell out of the nest. We're not allowed to keep wild animals, so he was taken to an animal rescue place.

According to an article I read online, some squirrels nest in holes and some do nest in tree branches as birds do - I haven't figured out where ours live.

[Marcus Rowland]

A couple of not especially good ones, testing a Canon 28-80 zoom with dead autofocus - not as sharp as I would like:

[subsea]

Posing for a shot on a cloudy, rainy, almost cold, day. Will spring ever come?

[aslyfox]

it is amazing to me what good equipment lets you do

[reh321]

I saw an unfamiliar rock out in our yard - but when I zoomed in with my camera, I discovered it was fuzzy and had eyes. Now I understood why my feeders weren't attracting any customers. He left when I went out to talk about the situation with him.

[normhead]

I have lots of squirrels around right now.... including some really small ones.

[Neuse River Sailor]

Rupert, I never knew you, but it's astonishing what you started...I wonder if you had any idea how many people would "join in the frenzy"...and how much pleasure you would create.

I just picked up a Canon - or should I say "cannon" - FD 70-210 f/4 that, on my crop sensor Fujifilm X-T20, lets me crouch in my window and reach out to the squirrels in the red maple in my back yard. Here are a couple of efforts. This squirrel photography is not easy...Taking a few of my own gives me even more respect for the masterful photographers at Pentax Forum.

[normhead]

Always room for one more. From today's walk.

[reh321]

First some background. We have two {indoor} cats in our family. Velcro was born in May 2003 and became the familys first cat when she joined us as reparation to our daughters when we moved the entire family to Kansas in August of that year because of an employment opportunity for my wife; today she is my wife's buddy. When we went to a shelter in 2011, to find another cat, after our second cat died of lymphoma, totally black Leila adopted me.

This past Tuesday, my wife asked me to take Velcro to the vet - she wasn't being friendly, and she wasn't eating. After a {$400} Xray was ambiguous, giving hint of a likely tumor, they had me bring her in on Wednesday for a {$400} ultra-sound. As she {the vet} shaved Velcro's abdomen for the ultra-sound, she discovered a large sore area under Velcro's tail that had been hidden by Velcro's fur. Fearing this might have been thrown off by an advanced tumor, she completed the ultra-sound and found nothing; examining the sore area, she determined this was a seriously infected bite. So now Velcro is on anti-biotics and an opiod-based pain medicine {liquid} that I need to get into her twice a day, and her behavior is slowly coming back to normal. We guess that Leila bit Velcro in some kind of dispute, and things went downhill fast.

So, why is this in a thread that is supposed to be about squirrels? Velcro and Leila have a cushy life - they've had to kill one mouse in the past four years, but somehow it came to this; once that infection got going, it would have been a real problem if my wife hadn't noticed something was wrong. I found myself wondering how often squirrel squabbles, or encounters with predators, lead to similar infections, and with nobody to notice, nobody to pay for diagnostics, nobody to provide ant-biotics, the situation would become very grim very fast.

[Neuse River Sailor]

The squirrels in my back yard maple try to stay in the shadows, probably so as not to attract the attention of the local marauding hawks and owls.

[Marcus Rowland]

Wild animals are exposed to a huge range of medical problems, most of which we never notice because they aren't obvious until the animal goes off and dies somewhere, or beats the odds and recovers.

There's a passage in one of Gerald Durrell's books where a visitor to one of his animal expeditions is talking about how horrible it is to take innocent animals out of the wild and put them in zoos. Then she makes the mistake of asking how he takes care of them, and we get a horrific page or so of him showing her how he examines and treats them for four or five different parasites that they are carrying, any of which could probably kill them in the long term, including huge parasitic worms under their skin.

[normhead]

Back to squirrels....





If you're going to post squirrel eaters, how about some wild one?

[photolady95]

Got a couple the last week. Ones I use for SIC when nothing else comes around.

Up close and personal:


And snuffling for seeds