The Return

Music:  Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca.  First listen.  (1) Because Deradoorian (now with Kate NV as Decisive Pink) was in the band (2) Because it was referenced in a comment on a reappraisal of Vampire Weekend's Modern Vampires of the City (a copy of which I own and enjoy) on the 10th anniversary of its release.  Interesting music from DP.  That's all I'll venture on the first listen.

The mallard pair are still visiting, and PG has looked up information on what mallards eat to adjust what she puts out for them.  Yesterday, a second mallard drake tried horning in on the pair and was sent packing by the other drake.  I got a moment of video on my phone before the fight broke up, not as much as I would have liked.

This morning, I looked out the back door and saw a squirrel rolling in the dirt where the red maple tree had been cut down.  In looking for a place to plant some phlox PG bought at the roadside store a couple of miles away, I'd raked away the remaining mulch and broken up the dirt clods.  The tree cutter had gotten rid of the main trunk to a depth of a few inches below the surface, but roots remained rooted on all sides.  I had pulled up the cut end of one of them, which resembled a cylinder about a foot long and an inch or so in diameter, and stuck up at maybe a 30 degree angle to the right.  

The squirrel continued to roll back and forth, frontward and backward, for several seconds.  I thought about reaching for a camera of some kind, but I'd left my phone upstairs next to the bed, and the cameras that only take pictures and don't make phone calls or track your every move... although now that I think of it, the DSLR can put a GPS location stamp on its photos, so I'll have to modify the second part of that clause... anyway, both the point-and-shoot with the 40x zoom and the DSLR with the 50mm prime lens were snug in the camera bag, also upstairs.

Then, the squirrel stopped, and it was as if it had spotted me somehow, some twenty feet away and behind a layer of a deck rail and row of balusters, and could see me peeking at it through the back door.  The squirrel stood up on its hind legs and put its front paws on the exposed root.  Its back paws were close to the bottom of the root, while it leaned a little to the left of vertical, opposite the rightward lean of the root.  It looked like it had been hiding behind the wood and was leaning its upper body away from it to get a better look, but holding on in case it had to pull its exposed body behind it.

It held that pose only long enough for me to wish I'd had a camera focused on it, ready to trip the shutter.   But this description will have to do.