An Early Evening Visit From Rocky the Flying Squirrel

Rocky takes center stage in another one of my stunningly bad wildlife photos.

All of you regular readers will remember Rocky the Flying Squirrel from last year. We hadn't seen our little gliding buddy for months and I feared he might have ended up as a dinner for Barry the barred owl. Apparently barred owls love flying squirrels, in a culinary sort of way. But Rocky appears to have survived the Summer, and he showed up at the bird feeder this evening around 05:30. Perhaps he's been coming to the feeder regularly and we just didn't see him. I'm guessing the flying squirrels are out earlier in the evening these days because the days are so short. It gets dark pretty early after all, around 11:00 in the morning most days. (Just kidding. It gets dark around 5:00 p.m.) In any case, Rocky was pretty fearless, letting me click several mediocre photos and even shine the flashlight out the window to get a good look. I'm surprised the flash on the camera and the flashlight didn't bother or scare him. Maybe he was just really hungry.