Well the snow has finally melted but the temps here are still very cold. I found two almost empty peanut butter jars, in my pantry after cleaning it out the other day.

So we put one out near the seed feeder bench. This type of offering is very popular upNorth, where peanut butter is a very big gourmet item for the wildlife.

Here is a photo of one of our squirrels partaking of one of the jars.
LOL
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Great photo! That's funny.
He/she is a solid little squirrel.
They're fun to watch. I spent many hours taking videos of the squirrels in parks in Washington DC when I was there one time. I'd never seen them before. I think everyone else thought I was a bit strange
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How cute!! I feed the squirrels here unsalted roasted peanuts. I watched one yesterday spend a good part of the afternoon burying the nuts he found all over the yard. Hope he remembers where they are!!

The ones he didn't get the blue jays scooped up. All the wildlife around here is well fed and it shows!!
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If these pics get any cuter I'm going to burst.
A good way to feed birds and squirrels is to prop up a gnarly, deep-barked log and fill the cracks with a fat(lard)/seed mix. This is particularly great for winter months.

Dave.

Not only is that a great pic, he looks like he's doing well despite the snow...nice and plumpy!
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Thanks for that mrsD.

Seeing squirrels (Red or Grey) is always a bonus when I do a trip to the Northern Hemisphere
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Heheheh... I find this season's squirrels very entertaining.

That view is right behind my monitor and the bench is my seedling bench( I grow some flowers from seeds each spring). I decided to put food out this winter as we had such a drastic winter...and I take photos thru the window.

I discovered we have FOUR varieties of squirrel which I had not realized before. In my profile album labeled "gardens" I have a photo of 3 of the squirrel types together. The little red squirrel I haven't put a photo up of, since I already have one there from upNorth of that type (a ground squirrel , it is often called).

I looked them up and learned that the black and gray are the same strain...only color variants of fur color. The large brown ones which are being displaced by the black/gray are called fox squirrels and appear tamer and less aggressive to us.

The gray ones we have do possess a wonderful bushy tail as well as being heavier and fatter looking. The blacks are smaller and more agile IMO and have much more modest tails.
This is a link to my album showing the 3 types:

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The little red ones can fit into the jar completely. And some of them are moving the jar all around-- carrying it. There were only dregs left in it, so they have to work to get the peanut butter out. UpNorth, the shrews will clean out a jar like this
in about 2 days. The pigmy shrews which are the smallest mammals are not mice...they are insectavores, and eat slugs, worms and insects mostly. But they LOVE peanut butter, and an
interesting kids science/naturalist activity up there has been to put peanut butter out on something, pull up a chair, be very quiet, and watch them come out of their little burrows to feast on it. They love the jars because they can fit inside them and feel safer. They are very very quick and require patience to observe.

We used to have a feeding board up there, in view of our dining table window, and watch them while we were inside at the table.
They are about the size of your first thumb joint to the tip of your thumb (not counting the little short tail). We only have the larger gray shrews here in the southern part of the state. Those can reach 4-5 inches long.

MrsD,
That's an amazing photo of the 3 squirrel types. Here, we only have the introduced Grey, our Native Red having been driven out to a few protected areas.
The shrew is quite a creature, living it's life at 100mph. David Attenborough (of course) narrated a superb documentary about them. In England they are the preferred food for Barn Owls at night and Kestrels in daylight hours. I think I heard once the Dormouse is related and they used to be a delicacy - but don't quote me on that
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Dave.

I've been labouring under a misapprehension for YEARS. Dormouses are not related to shrews. My Worldview is crumbling
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Here is a photo of a pigmy shrew caught by Weezie last summer.
It was carrying a slug, in the early damp morning. So I have both slug and shrew in the same photo. They are really really fast too... sometimes all you see is an impression that something moved past your foot!

I think the shrew was stunned...because it disappeared right after this photo.

Our nature book says shrews are not eaten by other mammals as their flesh is "rank" as it was stated. But I can see predator birds gulping them down whole.
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They have teensy eyes (mice and voles have large eyes), and pointy snouts, and they do not have incisor teeth like rodents. Just little pointy teeth, that the Vet up there says has terrible germs in the saliva, so if a cat is bitten, they get typically infected. Weezie's bite was initally thought to be a shrew but I now think it was one of those least weasels... as we have those too.