Outdoor Hour Challenge - Mammals - Squirrels

Well we finally got into gear this week and decided to actually join in on the Outdoor Hour Nature Study this week on Mammals. I took advantage of Librivox's recordings of Thornton Burgess's Animal book for Children. We listened to the first 6 chapters this week. My kids loved listening to these little stories. We did an outdoor hour study on rabbits a number of months ago when we had the opportunity to "bunnysit" our friends bunny. So we didn't join in with the bunny study last week but this week's study is on squirrels. We have a lot of squirrels in our neighborhood. So after listening to the chapters from the animal book about squirrels we headed out to find "Happy Jack".

Our mammal hunt of at first started out with the usual subjects. This is a neighbor's dog that almost always greets us when we walk by. It will often bring a ball and pass it under the fence for the kid to throw and play a little fetch.
As we walked around the block we noted that we still hadn't seen any squirrels. Usually there are squirrels running about all the time but when you go out to find them they must go into hiding.
We did spy a number of other mammals. These were the lounging type. They often found a nice chair to curl up in or a sunny spot on top of a car. My kids chased a few and most went into hiding under the cars or into bushes.

We finally spied our target mammal. We saw one run across the street and up into a tree. It was much too fast to take a picture of. But then we spotted one that we could actually catch on "film". He was just sitting quietly on a fence. Sophie noticed that he had a nut in his mouth. She had been gathering a lot of walnut shells as we walked around. They must have been the leavings of some of these little guys.
He sat still long enough for me to zoom in and snap one closer shot but then he took off.

I guess the boys who were ahead of us and had turned around to see what we were were looking at scared the little guy. He quickly scampered down the fence and across the street carrying his precious nut with him.

We really enjoyed the Burgess Animal book but I think we will take a little time this week and talk about some of the things in the Handbook of Nature study about squirrels. We have a few different color squirrels around our parts. We see some black ones (these tend to be a little more mean. We stay far away from these!) and some reddish colored ones which are a bit more rare but we see them when we go on walks up in the forests. Mostly we see the grey squirrels which my kids now refer to as "Happy Jack".