Squirrels

I like squirrels. A friend of mine once said that squirrels are just rats with bushy tails and good PR, but I disagree. Have you ever seen a rat have fun? In all honesty, I have only seen rats in scientific experiments, but I can't imagine seeing a rat out in the wild and thinking to myself, Boy, I'll bet he's having a good time. Squirrels, on the other hand, seem to have a ball chasing each other up and down and all around on tree limbs and roof tops. They locomote by bounding along, which also looks like fun.
I haven't decided whether squirrels are smart or mentally challenged. On the one hand, they can get into just about any bird feeder created. I have one of those feeders where the ledge on which the bird sits to eat the food can move up and down by way of a spring. If an animal larger than a cardinal or sparrow lands there, the weight of the animal, a squirrel, for example, pulls the spring which lowers the ledge which pulls a bar down blocking the food. One winter afternoon several years ago, I was in the house and heard this banga-banga-banga noise over and over. I traced the sound to the tree where the feeder was located and there was a squirrel hanging onto a tree limb with one front paw and using the other to violently move the ledge up and down which spilled the seed so he could eat it. On the other hand, I have been driving along in our residential neighborhood many times and had a squirrel start to run out into the road. Seeing the car, the squirrel freezes, and you can see the decisions floating across his squirrel face in a fleeting second: What to do? What to do?Do I run back off the road or keep going? Can't decide! Can't decide! More often than not, the squirrel chooses plan B, causing me to break to keep from running him over. That choice definitely knocks him out of the squirrel MENSA society (and may qualify him for a Darwin Award).
We have many squirrels in a variety of colors- mostly grey, but a few brown and even the occasional albino. This time of year they are busy collecting the acorns that have fallen off the big oak in the backyard and burying them 2 feet away. I imagine that by now they have eaten their way through their cache of my spring bulbs that they dug up. I like them anyway.