Squirrel blip Sunday

Wait a minute... is that right? It doesn't sound quite right somehow. Oh well, never mind - he's here now. I can't even claim that this is the only photo I got today - when I uploaded to the computer I discovered I'd taken 122 shots, which is ridiculous for a quiet Sunday at home; and obviously they all needed to be checked, and culled to a reasonable number for keeping - and that took a while.... which is why I'm posting late.

It all started when I glanced out of the kitchen window while I was making a cup of tea mid-morning, and saw a ridiculous stand-off going on between this little chap, two jackdaws and a magpie. He was doing pretty much what he's doing here - eating seed that had fallen from the big bird feeder which hangs in the apple tree about 15m from the house - except that he was carrying his tail in an S-curve up his back. The birds were all trying to sneak in to get some seed, but despite being bigger than him they were clearly frightened of being attacked - he only had to glance at them, or even just raise the angle of his tail slightly, and they literally jumped away. It was like watching children playing Grandmother's Footsteps, though clearly the presence of vicious claws and beaks made this a rather more serious business. After a number of futile attempts to get close enough to pick up some ground seed, first the magpie and then one of the jackdaws flew up to try to eat from the seeder - something they're poorly equipped to do, of course, and which resulted in still more spillage for Mr Squirrel, waiting below.

After watching for a few minutes I thought it was worth putting the 70-300 lens on the camera and seeing if I could get some shots - but the arrival of a human at the kitchen door was the final straw for the birds, and they all took off. The squirrel kept eating.

I then played my own game of Grandmother's Footsteps with him: for the next ten minutes I edged across the patio, pausing at each step to take some shots, and managed in the end to halve the original distance between us. As you can see in this photo (and the Flickr sequence if you're interested), he was mostly quite relaxed, though obviously he was keeping an eye on me, and sometimes he reacted to a noise - but I'm pretty sure I would have got closer still if Roley hadn't turned up to see what I was doing and caused him finally to lose his nerve.

Later in the day I saw this piece of nonchalant athleticism, but it was a different squirrel and reacted less well to being stalked - it wagged its tail furiously at me and then left. Shortly afterwards I managed a couple of shots of a greater spotted woodpecker eating peanuts, but from right back at the doorway because that definitely wasn't going to let me stalk it! CH and I have been discussing portable bird hides recently; we thought the idea was frantically amusing to begin with, but now we've progressed to an almost-serious discussion of the best place to set one up. Watch this space....

Oh - one last shot: Arthur, the hound who hates to be photographed, waiting by the back door after lunch to see whether any table scraps might be coming his way. And me by the kitchen table, where the camera was sitting with the long zoom still in place. Who could resist?