Preparation for the winter

Last weekend the Mister and I journeyed into the mountains. Despite temperatures reaching into the 80s (in the mountains, in West Virginia, in October!), smart organisms were preparing for the winter.
Chipmunks were on high alert. Around the Civil War graves at Droop Knob State Park, Eastern Grey Squirrels were chasing walnuts and each other. At Bear Town State Park,
the Red Squirrels stashing acorns and conifer cones wouldn't stop long enough for us to take a clear photo.












The trees were reabsorbing their chlorophyll.
And, at least one bear at Droop Mountain was eating large quantities. Whether he (or she) was absorbing any of the nutrients I have no idea, because he (or she) was certainly piling up the scat on along the trail. We encountered at least 6 large plops in less than a fourth mile of trail. Two were still glistening fresh, two appeared to be the previous day's, and two were still very squishy but growing mold.


Back at home our chipmunks seem especially excitable, our marmot (the local groundhog) is very fat, apparently feasting on chestnuts, and two beaver are building a lodge in the river which is visible from the bridge we cross on the way to work. Winter's coming!

Non-Monkey Rodent

The delay in D.C. caused us to cut out our trip with Happy Cricket to the beach. After delays in Miami, several aborted landing runs over Quito and an unexpected night in Guayaquil, we abandoned our plan of visiting Isla de la Plata and seeing the boobies because we just weren't up for a 12 hour bus trip after the airports and airplanes. So we arrived in Quito and headed almost immediately to Mindo (immediately the next day after visiting some churches, an art museum, the botanic gardens, an internet cafe, two bars . . .).

The small town of Mindo sits in the cloud forest

but that didn't stop the children marching down the main road for well over an hour from looking parched and about to pass out. We did not discover the reason for the festivities, but we did pick out a school for Ewaldina (our fictitious future child) if we should live on the Western Andean slopes near the equator.

Our second day in Mindo we went bird watching. It was a fabulous excursion, filled with tanagers, wrens, a helpful tucanette and eleven species of hummingbirds.

While watching the hummingbirds, I became excited by a loud rustling in the trees: a monkey! Or at least my first wild rodent in South America.

Fox Squirrel Habitat

The fat Fox Squirrels probably live in the Core Arboretum because of the arboretum's density and diversity of oak, beech and walnut, but the squirrels surely enjoy galloping among the bluebells, larkspur and trillium each spring.

Weekend of Many Rodents

Friday night the Mister saw "Our Marmot" who apparently survived last week's flood (all of the visible groundhog holes were far under water). Saturday we went botanizing to look at spring ephemerals (The flowers were gorgeous. I'm returning with my botany students in tow on Wednesday and hope to take photographs), and saw a groundhog near the interstate, a very fat fox squirrel with quite the foxy tail at Core Arboretum and an eastern chipmunk at the university forest. Sunday night we saw the beaver, suggesting that he, too survived the flood, although I was less concerned about him.

Squirrel Nutkin and Two Bad Mice

Beatrix Potter's work is delightful. I'm not sure what makes it so. Certainly the plots of The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tale of Two Bad Mice are silly at best. The illustrations are charming. Altogether, though, the books (particularly when read in their little square book form), transcend silly and charming and are enchanting classics: the best rodent media I've read or watched so far this year.

Illustration from the original via The Gutenberg Project.

Tree Rats of Marshall

Yesterday I attended the West Virginia Academy of Sciences meeting at Marshall University in Huntington. Professionally, it was a big step because my students presented and I was the proud advisor, I had to pay adult prices for the first time ever, and I may have successfully networked with real botanists. Rodent-wise, it was a good day because the center quad of the Marshall campus was teeming with eastern gray squirrels. They were chasing each other and digging in the bulb beds and acting completely unbothered by the flow of students, much like campus squirrels everywhere. Or everywhere except the campus where I work, at which I have not seen a squirrel.

Bonus Rodent Day

On one fantastic day over spring break, we not only saw this cutie (Eastern Chipmunk, Tamias striatus) who lives(d?) in a hole by our front porch, but we also saw a bunch of Eastern Grays (Sciurus carolinensis) at the wildlife preserve (although they were not the featured animals),
and our prairie dog and Vancouver Island Marmot made trips to the mountains, including Blackwater Falls.

Suburban Safari, The First Squirrel Book

Just finished reading Suburban Safari by Hannah Holmes and find I have strikingly little to say about it. I love the cover, which is an upclose shot of an eastern grey squirrel, and I like the concept: following the natural history of a suburban lawn for a year. I did, not, however, love the book. It's well researched. It's interesting. It's suitably scientific and suitably personal. It's just not fabulous. I've been reading it since September, I believe, and never found it can't-put-down-compelling (I read another personal essay/ecological research book, Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, during that time and found it hard to leave, so it's not the genre). Maybe my big issue was that Holmes spent a great deal of time taming a chipmunk to run into her house, run up her stairs and eat off of her hand, fed her squirrels and crows everyday, and then looks down on people for planting butterfly bushes to attract butterflies (in a part of the word where Buddleja is not invasive).
Definitely worth reading. Definitely not sending anyone out to buy it right now (altough it does have a big squirrel on the cover).