And now there are squirrels

When I was a kid, say, sixty years ago, there were no squirrels here. They hadn't been introduced. By, say, the late 1980s, they were pretty often seen here in the city.

When I was a child we almost all pronounced "squirrel" in a sort-of British way: "square-uhl" is pretty close to what I used to say. But, early in the 1970s, the American pronunciation crept in and almost no one here says anything like square-uhl anymore. We all say skwur-uhl.

We have only the little red skwurl-uhl and they are still rare enough most places that people like me stop to admire them, despite knowing people call them "tree rats" and think it was a very bad idea to introduce them. On that last point, I agree.

We were walking gingerly around a local pond today (gingerly because most of the path was very slippery ice). This fellow was working hard to gather spruce and fir cones from trees and poke them in a hole he had made in the grass under the snow. He didn't mind me stopping to watch.