January 17

We keep a birdfeeder just outside the sliding door of the sunroom, set on the end of a shepherd’s pole that is driven into the grass. Each morning my wife Sarah fills the tube full of black sunflower oil seeds and puts any excess in a little pile on the edge of the porch.

After weeks of this daily practice, the area around the feeder is littered with the cast offs that birds pull out of the feeder and drop on the ground below. It gives the snow a deeply peppered look.

I am watching around the feeder today, only because we have this jittery red squirrel whose antics around the porch are irresistibly comical. The red squirrel is one of among several resident squirrels that consist of roughly five ground and our singular red. We also have flying squirrels that live among the trees, but as they are largely nocturnal, we rarely see them and only occasionally hear their calls.

Our red typifies the petulant manner that Beatrix Potter so aptly describes in several of her children’s stories. He darts about defiantly often stopping to posture with two legs pushed forward and head held upright, chittering his warning call and briskly flicking about his tail.

Defiance will just as quickly give way to retreat when a passing shadow or sudden noise startles this mercurial little thing.

He is a hoarder that one, like all such rodents, and I suspect that the easy pickings of the sunflower cast-offs provide a ready supply of energy. This is particularly true as I believe the red may have forgotten more buried caches than he can remember, and what’s to worry when food is provided?