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| Hanging Twenty |
The weather has been warming up, so the squirrels in our backyard are out in force. At least one of them has learned how to by-pass the baffle this is supposed to keep the critters off of our bird feeder pole, and the suet feeders get cleaned out in just a few days. Our peach trees have been blooming, as have the early daffodils along the freeway or in town and along streets where the thermal units have been adding up faster than in our yard. The trees are still bare, so as it has been during the winter, I can watch how the squirrels leap from one tree to another, their extremities stretched out showing the skin that forms a small gliding surface.
These Eastern Gray Squirrels are not at all the leapers that Northern Flying Squirrels are that have large gliding surfaces between their fore and hind legs. I never saw the flying ones when I used to backpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, even though Hamilton Lakes where I camped a few times was supposed to be a place where they could be found - or at least my old Peterson Field Guide to
Mammals of North America said so. I hadn't looked at any actual range maps for flying squirrels before, but
one for California shows it to be wide-spread.
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| Hanging Twenty #2 |
Even though I have never seen a flying squirrel fly, I imagine if you
look at this link you can get a good idea for what it would look like, at least through binoculars with excellent magnification and resolution. Only if I were younger.
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