squirrel meets walnut

the baron and the husband have a large walnut tree in their yard. it's a lovely old tree, easily 40 feet high; it's currently playing host to one of the yard's two bat houses.

this tree, every fall, drops A LOT of walnuts, walnuts that litter the yard like the plastic cups on bourbon street after mardi gras. the walnuts are, at best, an annoyance, and at worst, something that might badly muck up the insides of the husband's lawn mower. the dogs are indifferent to them, except that one will occasionally get a shell piece stuck to the bottom of his or her paw, at which point s/he will gimp around the yard halfheartedly licking at the paw in question and giving the baron and the husband a look that quite plainly says, 'help'.

the squirrels LOVE the walnuts. they grub them around in their tiny little paws, using their teeth to peel away the outer shell. once they get the walnut open, they dig out all the meat, leaving a picked-clean empty shell. in the photo above, you can kind of see faint teeth marks on the outside of the shell. they're industrious, those squirrely bastards.