this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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Squirrels are just the best. If anyone goes to visit Taiwan - which I certainly recommend as strongly as possible - there's a park in the capital Taipei called 2/28 Memorial Peace Park (二二八和平紀念公園).
There are these gorgeous squirrels with red bellies that will eat nuts right out of your hand. They'll come up to you, take a nut and then run off about midway up a tree. Using their back legs to hold onto the bark, they dangle head-down against the trunk, eating with their front paws. Then you look around and all the trees have these vertical furry tree-slug looking squirrels dangling against them. Just cuting it up cutefully.
Red-bellied plumpers is what my wife and I called them. They're just the best.
Years ago I was walking through a park area of UC Berkeley while on vacation and this squirrel walked right in front of me and stood there, so I stopped and watched it. I realized I had some food in my backpack and there might be something squirrel-appropriate, so I very slowly took it off and opened it up, hoping the squirrel wouldn't get scared and run away. I found something - like a grape or something, don't remember what - and got it out to toss to the squirrel, but when he saw it he ran up my pants leg and stopped at about my waist. Scared the crap out of me. I held out the food and he took it with one hand, stuck it in his mouth, and ran away.
That's when I learned that there are apparently tame squirrels all around Berkeley.
Jealous! My sister lived in that area and we went squirrel walking a few times on visits but I was never so lucky as to have one crawl over me.
That walking up to you and standing up behavior - I've started to see that at a cemetery here in Portland that we walk around, but so far all the squirrels have waited a short distance away for food to be thrown to them.