It's Walnut Season (Shallow Thoughts)

It's Walnut Season

It's walnut season. The neighborhood is full of crows, making rattling calls, flying from place to place with walnuts in their beaks, and dropping walnuts on roads to try to crack them. It's always entertaining to watch the crows' antics. Walnuts are hard to crack, even when you're a professional.

Meanwhile, the squirrels are going crazy. In addition to running around carrying walnuts the size of their heads, burying, digging up, and re-burying, we've also seen squirrels fighting with each other, threatening each other, whirling around in trees for no apparent reason, and perching on wires barking at invisible enemies below.

I had assumed that they were barking at cats or other squirrels in neighbors' yards, but this morning I saw a squirrel on the power line above the driveway, barking and threatening and staring intently at ... the empty driveway. If there was anything there, it must have been the size of an ant.

Makes me wonder ... do walnuts ever ferment? Am I seeing a neighborhood full of drunken squirrels?

Tags: nature, urban wildlife
[ 12:16 Sep 14, 2005    More nature | permalink to this entry | ]