Adele Ferguson - ‘Lefty’ and ‘Tea Party’ return

THERE’S PROBABLY nobody happier that the snow is gone — well, it’s gone at my place — than my two flying squirrels.

It has been their daily habit to show up next to the log on which I sit each morning while I eat an apple after picking up the daily papers.

They await discard of the core, which I drop next to the log, then get up and walk up the driveway to the house. Me, that is, I walk up to the house, not the squirrels. I know they eat the core because every morning the previous morning’s core is gone.

They also have gotten familiar enough to walk up the log to where I am sitting to see my progress in finishing off the apple. If I am still chomping away, they vanish until I am gone.

I got about five inches of snow, however, that lasted three or four days and remained on the log so I ate the apple up at the house instead, leaving nothing for the squirrels.

THE FIRST MORNING the snow was gone, the squirrels showed up, Lefty coming up on the log to eye me, and Tea Party–well, that’s a better handle than Righty–came running down the driveway from the right.

I’ve only seen them fly a couple of times and they don’t exactly fly. They soar. They can’t navigate up, of course, only from up down. My first view of Lefty was when some tree cutters dropped a large pine tree next to my driveway and while the logger was topside trimming branches, the squirrel came sailing out of it, landing in an apple tree across the way. Perfect landing.

The other day, though, I was walking down the driveway when both of the squirrels came sailing out of the apple tree and landed on the ground across the driveway. They headed for the brush and waited for me to do my thing.

They’re tiny little things, almost black. I also have a large gray squirrel that shows up but I don’t think it has cottoned to the fact that there is a daily apple core available. The gray is two or three times bigger than my pair of fliers.

I WAS WORRIED for awhile that I had another creature I didn’t care to have make its home with me although common sense told me it was impossible.

One morning during the first heavy snowfall, I found crossing my driveway a trail that looks as if it had been made by a very large boa constrictor. You know, the kind that stars in “Boa vs. Python” on the SyFy channel.

It began in the brush on the east side of the driveway and crossed to the other side ending in the bushes there.

It was close to a foot wide and was a deep impression just like that which would be made by a large heavy snake. I knew it was too cold for a snake of any size but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was.

The mystery was solved after the snow had melted when one of my neighbors came by on his usual daily walk and I told him about it.

“Oh, I can tell you what it was,” he said. Enlighten me. I said.

It was a river otter,” he said. “I’ve seen them in my back yard. Otters don’t walk in the snow. They sort of swim or slide through it. I’m sure you’ve seen those Walt Disney nature movies where they show the otters sliding down hills. They do it just for fun.”

Well, that’s better than it being a boa constrictor, I said.

Now if I can just identify the strange footprints some bird left on my snowy steps

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69. Hansville, Wa.. 98340.)