Squirrels and a Dog

First, let's talk about squirrels. They are busy these days. This is our driveway, and above our trash cans is a hickory tree. The squirrels pick a week at the end of every summer—I assume it's when the hickory nuts are mature—to stock their pantry with hickory nuts. They work like crazy in the tree and it's literally buzzing with activity for hours at a time, for about a week in total. (It's so loud it sounds like it's raining, and sometimes it is when a whole nut or a branch falls on the driveway or garage roof.) As the days pass, the mess on our driveway grows and grows. Above is a picture I took soon after the activity began. There's a bit of hickory nut mess, but not much.

A few days later, it happened to be trash day so you can see the contrast where our trash cans had been placed.

As of today this is what it looks like. Need I say, our driveway is a mess! But in the interest of having a blogworthy topic to photograph, we've let the nut mess accumulate for you to see!

This is the debris up close. It's mostly bits and pieces of the nuts, with assorted branches and whole nuts that fall during all the activity. In addition, all over our deck there are areas where a squirrel has taken just one nut or two and done the work of extracting the nut from the outer casing and left the remains. So in other words, we have many mini versions of what we have en masse all over the driveway.

And now: a dog! (We got out early this morning—before the heat was too bad and before the sun came out. At 3:00 p.m. my weather app says it's 95 degrees and feels like 102. Needless to say, we're staying inside now!)