It’s National Squirrel Appreciation Day!

January 21, 2017 • 2:00 pm

How could I forget? Well, I am still feeding my gang 3 times per day: sunflower seeds, pecans, and peanuts.

Be good to your squirrels, even though there are some nasty people on the Internet who want to hurt them.  And you can get bonus points here if you do something nice for a squirrel. Send a photo of your sciurophile activities
 and, if there’s a really good one (has to be taken today or tomorrow), I’ll send out a copy of Faith Versus Fact with a squirrel drawn in it.

squirrel-2Here’s a new photo freom reader Diana MacPherson:

Black Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), Sheltered from Winter Weather, Eats a Nut

black-eastern-gray-squirrel-%28sciurus-carolinensis%29%2c-sheltered-from-winter-weather%2c-eats-a-nut

h/t: Nicole

16 thoughts on “It’s National Squirrel Appreciation Day!”

  2. Sweet.
    I’d have a hard time imaging our squirrels since our canid keeps them at quite a flight-distance.

  3. I don’t have a lot of squirrels at my house but my mother is a self-proclaimed squirrel whisperer. She has a whole a scurry of squirrels in her backyard and not only feeds them but names them as well (“Oh that’s Bob and that’s Blackie and that’s…”). They’ve been known to hang on her screen door and chatter for peanuts (to which my mom will cheerfully oblige to their demands).

    -Rachel

  4. I tried to save a little squirrel from drowning this morning in a flooded creek. He was trapped on a small portion of stump protruding from the raging water and looked like a drowned rat. Another hiker and I moved a rather large branch out to the stump and made a bridge. After we backed off, he scampered to safety and bolted past us into a nearby field. Only then did I notice it was a little brown bunny, not a squirrel. Too bad it’s not “Bunny Appreciation Day”.

          1. Searches for glyph. How about : 😺 (U+1F63A ; “SMILING CAT FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH”)

          4. Oh, sorry – it’s my notes for myself.
            In general, you can put any defined UNICODE character into a HTML data stream as [whitespace]"ampersand"[no-whitespace]"encoding string"[no-whitespace]"semi-colon"[whitespace]
            So, for example, after stripping out the additional whitespace from “& plusmn ;” you get ± which is displayed as the glyph that UNICODE decribes as “plus-minus sign (plus-or-minus sign)”
            That’s general HTML. However different website frameworks (including, but not limited to WordPress) can choose to do things slightly differently. Some accept the HTML entity names (“plusmn” in this example). Others might accept the UNICODE reference number as a hexadecimal number (“00B1”) ; some accept a decimal number (“177”). When typing on my home system, if I hold down the Ctrl+Shift+U, then type the hex code, then press [space] or [enter], then I get the plus-minus character. And on other systems I’ve worked with, I need to type the decimal number (177) not the hex number. So I keep notes of the whole lot in BBCode, and that’s the data line I gave you, forgetting that I have to edit it down myself to make it work.
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input probaby explains it better.

            My “plus-minus” data line is “&plus mn; & plusmn ; U+00B1 (177) ; plus-minus sign (plus-or-minus sign)” (I had to insert whitespace into the “&plus mn;” part to stop it from being parsed by WordPress.)
            This gives me the : [correct HTML] [broken HTML] U+[hexadecimal number for reference] ; ([decimal number for reference]) ; [text description]
            Sorry, it’s a bit of a bodge. It’s done a “Topsy” – it just growed.

          5. Interesting. I’m afraid by the time I worked out the code I will have forgotten what it was I wanted to say. 😎

  5. I just took my kid on a Flying Squirrel nature talk and walk today! So we appreciated some squirrels. Fast little buggers, with Disney-big eyes (literally, not an illusion; their eye-to-skull size ratio is something like 50% bigger than ours). We got to see three of them scurrying around a feeder for about 10-15 minutes, and then one ‘flew’ in from another tree. Quite fun.

  7. I’m a bit late to the party, but I’ve sent in my entry. Fortunately, my squirrels are very co-operative since I have bought out their loyalties of any sort with large sacks of sunflower seeds!

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