Working away this afternoon, I was disturbed by the sounds of thumping and scuttling from the windowsill outside my office. When I cracked the blinds (I keep them closed to keep sun glare off my computer), I saw several baby squirrels at play. There were two, then three—almost certainly from one brood.
I opened the blinds fully and took a video with my camera (apologies for the window reflections). They weren’t disturbed by my presence, because they are used to me: I feed them seeds and nuts every day.
Clearly, what I thought was a single juvenile named Tufty E. is actually three squirrels who look the same. Given that I can’t tell them apart, I’ll just call them The Tuftys.
And here’s part of the delightful interlude I saw:
They’re in good nick, aren’t they? I love their clean white tummies.
Dogpile!
…er…squirrelpile…?
b&
It’s so cute when baby animals play like that. The baby chipmunks play like that too. Then they grow up and get all territorial with each other and it is sad.
Terrific!
And what magnificent tails at such a young age.
And what a demonstration of the inexhaustible energy of youth.
It makes you wonder about what happens to those lucky kids who use this formidable reservoir of energy to pursue perfecting skills or knowledge instead of frittering it away in idle pursuits.
They become wunderkinds, opera stars, Wimbledon champions, chess nuts like Bobby Fischer, musical prodigies like Yehudi Menuhin, super scholars à la Richard Feynman, or computer and Internet inventors.
There’s a hidden biological lesson in the wild play of those baby squirrels.
You ‘d think they were knocking some sense into each other’s heads against the window. So cute!
I once lived close to a canyon in San Diego. I walked out to my backyard and stumbled upon three young skunks playing with each other. They immediately went into a defensive posture with tails raised, and I thought, “Oh, oh! I’m in for it now.” The skunks soon tired of the freeze frame we had created and went back to their play until a roommate wandered out to see what I was enjoying. The skunks went back into their defensive posture, but chose to leave us humans to our own devices and wandered off after each other down into the canyon where they had come from. I always enjoy being able to observe nature closely without it getting all ‘huffy’ on me.
Here’s a photo taken in Scotland of a red tufty
John
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Too stinking cute!!!
I have an army of squirrels on our acre of land that is filled with trees. Love them!
Squeerrils gone nuts.
Don’t you mean sqrls- LOL?
The squirrels certainly are cute, but I love that nice, healthy looking Parthenocissus tricuspidata vine they are playing around.
🙂