Much to my amazement when I wanted to step on my balcony this afternoon, I discovered this:
Yes, that’s a squirrel. A freaking cute small squirrel asleep in my beanbag. A squirrel. Asleep. In my beanbag. How cute is that?! I’ve never seen a sleeping squirrel before, let alone one in a beanbag! By accident I then woke the little thing up and it jumped away, but a few minutes later it was back. Eyes shut and sleeping peacefully:
These pictures (and a couple more photos up on Flickr) don’t do it justice; you can actually see it breathing heavily as if it was snoring. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had gotten closer that it was doing just that (cats snore, so why not squirrels?). I didn’t want to open the door and step out, cause I’m sure it would have ran away then. It’s dark now outside, but it’s still there.
With the pigeon nest (I’ll come around to that in another blog post) in the other corner, this balcony is turning out to be quite the wildlife shelter. What’s next, I wonder?
No related posts.
Twitter/mseckington
Flickr/mseckington
LinkedIn/Melinda Seckington
Facebook/Melinda Seckington
July 8th, 2008 at 23:47
I grew up in South Dakota, where there are a LOT of squirrels (not so many out here in California where I live now).
I don’t know how this got started…but my Grandmother used to put peanut butter on a saltine cracker, and put it on the front porch of our home. A squirrel (the same one as far as we could tell by its markings), would scamper up to the porch, grab the cracker, and then scamper back to the tree in the front yard and lick off the peanut butter.
And then scamper back to our porch, and leave the uneaten saltine cracker for more peanut butter!
We fed that squirrel for at least two years. We were extremely sad (I remember crying) when that squirrel stopped picking up his peanut butter crackers.
There must be an Animal Hobo sign somewhere on your home if you have that many critters visiting…it’s a blessing.
Thank you for the memory nudge!
Morjana
July 9th, 2008 at 12:00
That is easily the most adorable thing I’ve seen all day (and this includes the photo of my parents tortoiseshell cat eating grass that’s my desktop background). On the possible downside, is the squirrel responsible for the missing piece of covering I see next to it, or is that a pre-existing feature?
July 9th, 2008 at 12:18
@Morjana: Peanutbutter, heh? Will have to try that out with “my” squirrel. Coming from the Netherlands I had no idea that squirrels were like this. I mean, we’ve got them there, but only in forests and grassy areas. Not in a completely urban area.
@Tom: I’m not exactly sure. Thing is: a couple of weeks ago we forgot to take the beanbag back in, when it was raining, so left it there for a couple of days. When we finally remembered to bring it back in again, we found a pigeon nest behind it. Decided to leave the beanbag until the nest was gone and to then throw it away.
So the beanbag has been there for some time and we’ve had some pretty stormy and windy days. I wouldn’t be surprised if the damage came from that. Then again I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the squirrel who did that!
July 10th, 2008 at 17:06
Awwwwwwww, you should have filmed the little thing