A Nutty Thing Happened...

A nutty thing happened one morning this past week...

I had been out a number of times feeding Pierre and some of the other Pigeons. As I interacted with my flock of friends, I could not help but take notice to a peculiar Eastern Gray Squirrel who was observing us. With every visit out back to feed one of my birds buds, this Squirrel seemed to be more observant, like he was taking notes.

Probably the 5th time out for me, I'm on the back deck hand feeding one of the Pigeons, this Squirrel is on the ground below. He's looking up at the action and makes his way to a nearby tree. He's climbing up it, always keeping an eye on me and I could tell he was calculating his moves. Up the tree. Then on to the rail for the clothes line. He's almost eye level and a few feet away. Now he leaps on to my shoulder! If I was not expecting this as I watched him make his way here, he probably would have scared the bejeebus outta me. And from my shoulder he raced along my arm, scaring the Pigeons away and had himself a nice feast of shelled roasted peanuts and sunflower chips from the palm of my hand. It was a good handful and he was not about to leave any of it behind.

I was not freaked out by this but even with my comfort level I still used a heavy amount of caution with this interaction. The last thing I wanted to do was spook this Squirrel as who knows what could have come of it. I have been accidentally bit by a Squirrel in the past and it hurts like hell. Bee stings don't hurt nearly as much, well the initial stinging anyway.

He was cool and calm about this moment even as the p'od Pigeons fluttered around us.

I took a few photos, I shot a 1 minute video of the encounter and still had more time to kill as I let him finish up.

A good candidate for a "CAPTION THIS" contest.

When he had cleaned everything from my hand, I slowly moved my arm towards the clothes line rail. As I got my hand to it, he looked back at me, kinda like "I guess that's it, huh?" and hopped off.

He's been around every morning since then but we've not had a repeat occurrence. I've really not made the attempt. I'm fine leaving him a pile somewhere on the ground to have at and Pierre is quite okay with this too.

I talked to Angie about this. The Squirrel does look familiar and after some thinking back, we are certain he is one of our coffee deck buddies in the warmer days of 2015. He often got on the table and helped himself to some shelled nuts that Angie was tossing out to the Squirrels, so they would eat them and not bury whole ones in the garden. He has a very distinct tail, imperfect as some would call it. I am surprised we've not seen him for the last 4 months. I'm out there every day/night and if not, I am looking out the window quite often. Believe me when I say that not much goes through here unseen.

Hopefully he sticks around as Spring slowly approaches and mornings of coffee on the deck happen once again.