Return of the Rock Squirrel

It’s been a while — more than six years, in fact — since I devoted any pixels to rock squirrels. That’s primarily because we haven’t been able to observe many of them, and I don’t know why. I expected that they would be more plentiful given the rather large family I wrote about in the post linked above, but that didn’t happen.

But we’re beginning to get regular visits from [at least] one and it’s always a treat. Rock squirrels are the more skittish and better behaved cousins to the Eastern Fox squirrels that swarm through our trees, drop half-eaten pecans on our deck, and sploot on our back porch during the hottest days of the summer.

Rock squirrels can climb trees but they rarely do, preferring to forage for pecans in our lawn.

But they are quite wary, and will flee the premises if they just spot our movement in the house through a window pane.

It’s the splooting that caught our attention. We’d never seen a rock squirrel do it, and it was almost like it had been watching the tree squirrels and thought, “hey, I could do that!”

This one was prone and flattened, but alert…it apparently wasn’t there for snoozing, like the tree squirrels.

I grabbed my DSLR with long lens and cautiously pointed it around a doorway in an attempt to get some photos before it clocked me and took off. If you look carefully, its throat has a bit of a bulge.

I zoomed in a bit closer and caught it holding something in its mouth with its feet.

It stuffed the pecan back in its mouth, taking on the appearance of an animal with the mumps.

The instant I snapped the last photo, it somehow sensed my presence and made a hasty exit from the porch and deck, under the fence, and down to the rocks on the creek bank where it has a den.