Squirrels falling out of the sky isn’t something that’s unheard of in Huddersfield — see this BBC News story about an inventor who suffered whiplash from a falling squirrel — but I’d not seen it happen until yesterday.
Late yesterday afternoon, we ventured out into the snow and had a little wander through the local woods. I’d taken my camera with me and, not too far into the woods, I took this photo of the path…
My camera’s set up to do a “burst” of shots, so it automatically took another 3 photos in quick succession. Just as I was taking the first photo, I was aware of a noise in the tree tops — what I didn’t realise was it was the sound of a squirrel falling 😀
The next shot caught the squirrel in mid-fall, although it’s just a blur in the middle of the frame…
…it had a soft landing in about 9 inches of snow…
…and then headed straight back up the nearest tree…
…within seconds it was leaping around the tree tops like nothing had happened…
Tag: squirrels
Tree Trimming Tips
Many thanks to Talis’ Paul Miller for inviting me to take part in their latest Talking with Talis today.
Just before the recording session started this afternoon, workmen from the local council pulled up outside our house to do some tree trimming. So, if you detect any odd noises in the background then it’s probably their 3 chainsaws and wood chipper rather than the Superpatron suffering a bout of chronic flatulence 😉
If you like pictures of trees getting mutilated, then there’s more here!
I’m not too sure that the local squirrel population will make of the trimming, as there used to be several overhead crossing points for them (where the branches of trees on opposite sides of the road mingled together).
CODI 2005 – Homeward Bound!
Sadly the two “spare days” after the end of CODI 2005 have flown by and tomorrow morning we’re setting off back to the UK. By the way, just in case anyone wants to know what “the sun going down on CODI 2005” looked like, here it is/was:
We spent most of yesterday in St Paul (the sibling to Minneapolis in the title “The Twin Cities”). As some of the Horizon mailing list regulars will know, we were keen to visit the Catbus exhibit at the Minnesota Children’s Museum – and just to prove we did, here’s Bryony in the front seat:
…and here’s Totoro himself:
…and there’s more pictures here!
For lunch, we walked about a mile out of St Paul to Red’s Pizza Savoy. After the cosmopolitan Minneapolis, Red’s felt like a taste of true Americana.
We even made it back in time to go and give the Loring Park squirrel’s their tea:
CODI 2005
Sunday afternoon
Well, it turned out that half of Minneapolis got to Hell’s Kitchen ahead of us, and the wait for a table was 90 minutes. Instead, we finished up at Caribou Coffee (next door to Brit’s Pub) for breakfast.
We wanted to get something to feed the Loring Park squirrels with, but all we could find at Target was a catering sized pack of “Squirrel & Critter food” …so, we ended up buying that!
Within minutes of arriving at Loring Park, we were surrounded by dozens of hungry squirrels – a few are even tame enough to eat straight from your hand:
