More squirrels at Olney, Illinois...

It was a beautiful day and driving the hour trip over to Olney was a pleasure with beautiful clouds and golden grasses and Queen Anne's Lace all along the road side, and fields of corn or soybeans everywhere you looked. We stopped in Olney and asked at a convenince store where we were most likely to find a white squirrel and the very helpful young lady told us to try the park out by East Fork Lake. This turned out to be good advice and this is a fairly large lake with a very nice birding area along one side with trails. We want to go back some time in the future. We saw several great blue herons and smaller birds in the distance, but there was quite a bit of boating going on and people fishing.
The minute Mike parked the car, I spotted a white squirrel in the park and jumped out and tried to get some pictures even though it was a ways off. He decided to head up this tree and we never saw him again. I was satisfied to just see one and would have been content with that! We sat and ate a picnic lunch and just watched for awhile in case he came back.

Hanging in the trees of this park are all of these squirrel houses made from old tires! What a great way to recycle tires! I want a couple of these! When we got home I looked on the internet and found this web site. http://www.squirrelhouses.com/buy.html

Think how much nicer this would be than a drafty leafy home???

We headed back to town to try the other park where they ususally hang out, but there was a county fair going on and not much hope for seeing any. Spotted this bird up on the wire.....Eastern Kingbird? Not a bird I really know, so a nice suprise.

Welll.....I got things out of order.....we did hike around a bit on the trails by the lake stalking dragonflies and damselflies and whatever. Mike took this nice fungi picture.

He also took this female dragonfly and I don't now which female it is!

At the town park we saw their regular grey squirrels, which are just as cute as the white ones :-) This is interesting to me, because they are not my usual Fox Squirrels from back home and this is just an hour from where we live. I knew there were grey squirrels around our area, but never see them at our house.

This little guy had found a fallen branch loaded with something good to eat....

.....and decided to ignore us in favor of the goodies.

Just as we were driving through town to leave, I happend to glance over at a very small little park where a man was feeding something.........sure enough, I saw one was a white squirrel! This one was so tame, I could get out of the car and walk all around taking pictures of it and it's friend.

He was tossing them grapes and I believe it is "wrestling" with one here.

.....searching for more

.......here he has a grape and is taking it up the tree to the little sitting post where I took many pictures of him.

I know that a squirrel is a rodent, but never realized how much they look like mice or rats until I saw this white one coming down the tree and don't have the fluffy tail in the picture! We used to have a pet white mouse that looked just like this in miniature! The tail makes all the difference in making you think "cute" instead of "eek....it's a mouse!"

Here he is showing off his tail for me :-)

As we left town we decided to drive all the way around the lake before heading home. There were a lot of big beautiful homes along the lake's shores and also some farms on the other side of the road. We passed this one field full of horses and I thought they were really beautiful with their shaggy manes!

How do they see???

The wire fence and the high grasses caused me some shooting problems.

Isn't he beautiful?

I'll stop here and switch to some other things we saw tomorrow.