Red Squirrel, Wells National Estuarine Research Center at Laudholm Farms, Wells ME

This might actually be the same Red Squirrel I encountered on the Laudholm Farms boardwalk a few weeks ago. It was certainly in about the same area. However, if you remember, on that encounter the squirrel was relatively shy, if determined. It would allow me to approach to within about 20 feet, and then it would lose its nerve and scamper on down the boardwalk to find another seed to eat further away. I moved it probably 150 feet down the boardwalk before it scampered off into the forest. This time, the squirrel seemed determined to defend its stretch of boardwalk. I felt like the Borlog and the squirrel was Gandalf. He would leap up to a tree and threaten me, than he would plant himself firmly on the little 3 inch tall rail of the boardwalk and glare a clear message “you shall not pass!” Then he would charge me. Me. He charged. The squirrel. Tail twitching. Ears erect. Eye to eye. He charged down the rail to within six feet of me before thinking better of it and flying off into the forest…only to land right back on his tree and then the rail where he had started: 20 feet from me and glaring.

Not only that, when I first saw him he was eating, relatively speaking, a log. You see it here. He was sitting up, holding this stick in his paws like a giant cob of corn, and was breaking it up and extracting something from the pulp. In his first few charges at me he carried the log with him, and even after he dropped it, it might have been what he was defending.

Eating his log like corn.

Finally, he had already been in the wars. When I got the images home, you can clearly see in many of them that there is a fresh wound in front of his right eye. I suspect he got it scrapping with other Red Squirrels, but it might have been from a unsuccessful predator attack (unsuccessful from the predator’s standpoint). I told you. A veritable borlog of a Red Squirrel! (Oh wait…he was supposed to be Gandalf 🙁

Wounded

The first two shots are with the Nikon P900 at 2000mm equivalent field of view. The last shot is with the Sony HX90V at 720mm equivalent field of view. I switched cameras because on his close approach the squirrel was inside the closest focus on the Nikon. 🙂 Processed in Lightroom.