Critters!

No snakes in this post, I promise. This is just a dose of cute for your Monday blues.

First up, my obsession lately has been this guy:

I feel like somebody's watching me...

And occasionally stalking me...

I've been seeing him quite a bit (around the rental house), but he's shy and doesn't hold still for pictures.  Also, it turns out he is maybe a she, but more on that later.  This is a fox squirrel, which I'd heard of but wasn't really familiar with until we moved to Georgia.  They are bigger than a regular squirrel, and they look like a cross between a squirrel and a ferret.  Except cuter.  They can be typical squirrel colors, and some are solid black.  Ours has a white nose and ears - she's a reverse panda!

You can just barely see the white face in this blurry, thru the window picture.

According to Wikipedia, their ideal habitat is "small stands of large trees interspersed with agricultural land".  So our yard should be teeming with them, except fox squirrels are usually solitary, and this is the only one I'd seen until yesterday.  Then, cuteness overload happened:

Hello!

This is the very definition of frolicking.

Or possibly cavorting.  This is when I realized that our black squirrel was probably female, and the gray one is her boyfriend.

So now I'm hoping for fox squirrel babies, and wondering if I can kidnap...er, relocate them to the farm.

We see a good bit of wildlife around here, and we keep binoculars handy for when we do. Unfortunately we can't always get good (or any) pictures.  We were treated to peeks at turkey courting for weeks, but could never get a picture.  Here are a few critter pics we have managed to get.

We see plenty of rabbits around the rental house.

This guy didn't appreciate having his picture taken, either.

Kamikaze cardinal flew into the window

Reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated. 

Peek-a-boo squirrel

Sometimes the wildlife camera can get the pictures that we can't.  Mostly of deer.

Not camera shy at all.

Wait, get my good side.

The deer version of water cooler talk.

 Occasionally the wildlife camera gets a glimpse of critters other than deer.

Red fox, just going about his business 

Not a fox.

After extensive and exhausting analysis, we've decided that last shot is of a coyote.  We saw him once in daylight, and have seen evidence of his visits to our yard.  We had some other shots to compare with as well.  Plus the most important evidence:  I want to believe!