I'll confess it — I have a profound soft spot for these Douglas Squirrels (Tamiasciurus douglasii, translated loosely by Daniel Mathews, "the steward who sits in the shadow of his tail" — rather nice).
They're native in my region, on an island off the northwest coast of america, and abundant, and as all the field guides will emphatically tell you, they're noisy.
A friend, living not far from where I snapped the above photo (and about which I have more to say at right), and I, have shared snaps of these guys, emailing them back and forth. My friend lives near the forest, while I'm across a pasture from it, so he sees these little fellows more often than I; a photo of his is below (you can tell my pal's a bird feeder, as am I):
The best photo of all, in my opinion, was the one that I put on the website... which didn't exist — not until I got home, uploaded the images (nearly 200 of the squirrel and his chipmunk neighbor), and saw how brilliant many of them were, and promptly snapped up the domain name ("dot-info" was merely a dollar for registration at the time), wrote up a little page of xhtml, uploaded the image, in full, 3000x2000 resolution, and the new page, to the server — it took just about as long for me to format the page and create the directory as it did for the hosting to propagate, so to speak, so within an hour of arriving home, I had my little, photogenic friend on the world wide web.
Now, as I say, I'm quite fond of these little chaps (yes, some of whom I know are colleens, or lasses, but they don't mind being lumped into one gender, they're so congenial, and unless you see them hanging upside down (which is rare), you don't get a look at their dugs, or their package, so they're all just chaps).
Once, I was looking up information on the rabbits in my area — what sort were they, exactly? I learned, from the Smithsonian Institution's excellent North American Mammal database, that they're Eastern cottontails (Sylvilagus floridanus), introduced about a hundred years ago as a game animal.
while scouting around the excellent database, I came across the page for my little friend, the Douglas Squirrel. They're named for the Douglas-fir, an abundant conifer and prolific seeder (and primary food source) in their range, and not for David Douglas, the naturalist attached to Vancouver's exploration of northwestern america.
The mammal database page mentioned that the squirrel's main food was pine seeds... to which I took exception (knowing what I know of them, and my comment above), and accompanied by my notions about calling a fir a fir, and not lumping them all — hemlocks, pines, spruces, firs, cedars — into the generic "pine." I am among the few who calls the common douglas-fir cone a "fir cone;" my son was the only one of his contemporaries I ever heard calling it out properly.
So I found a "contact" link, and sent off an email, taking exception to the site's somewhat limited (I thought) view of the squirrel and his ecological place, so to speak. I was polite, but direct, as I recall (don't want to hunt down the email and paste in the text... take my word for my part of it...).
I soon had a reply, from the Smithsonian Institution's Curator of Squirrels, according with my view, but outlining the importance of pine seeds in significant parts of their range.
He included an exhaustive pdf attachment, with more detail than any but an obsessed wildlife biologist would want... which would be perfect to post at a website with a compendiumm of detail devoted to public relations for these handsome chaps.
I have a number of images, nearly all of which I would freely license, to make avaiable as a resource, as well as information and cross-referencing links. But it's a pro bono project, so it has had to wait. In fact, writing up this page about my concept is as much effort as I've put into it since not long after I bumped the little project up to the web server.
Perhaps soon, I'll collate and compile and assemble all my resources, and get them up there?
The ambition certainly seems worthy.
