{"id":6565,"date":"2010-03-25T15:39:36","date_gmt":"2010-03-25T22:39:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=6565"},"modified":"2010-03-25T16:19:02","modified_gmt":"2010-03-25T23:19:02","slug":"spring-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=6565","title":{"rendered":"Spring"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the little bushes just outside the window of my office rustled, so much so that they caught my eye. A black furry tail poked out of the bush; one of the fat black squirrels <sup>1<\/sup> that lives on the church grounds was in the bush. I was surprised that it bore its weight.<\/p>\n<p>Five minutes went by. The bushes started rustling again. This time, it was a gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis). I realized that a couple of Oregon Juncos (Junco hyenalis oreganus) were chirping at the squirrel; maybe the juncos were nesting in the bush and the squirrel was going after their eggs! I ran outside and scared the squirrel away. I looked quickly in the bush for a nest, didn&#8217;t see one, then retreated into my office because if there is a nest I don&#8217;t want to drive the birds away from it.<\/p>\n<p>The juncos are still noisily chirping away. The squirrels have returned to stealing food from the trash cans. I still don&#8217;t know if there&#8217;s a nest out there or not.<\/p>\n<p><em>Later<\/em><\/p>\n<p>A gray squirrel came back (perhaps the same one again), and nosed around beneath the bushes outside my window. A junco harassed it constantly, chirping, flying at the squirrel&#8217;s head, causing the squirrel to duck and twitch. At last the squirrel gave up, and scampered off with the junco chasing it.<\/p>\n<p><small><sup>1<\/sup> Melanistic form of the Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), an invasive species which has been introduced into the San Francisco Bay region.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the little bushes just outside the window of my office rustled, so much so that they caught my eye. A black furry tail poked out of the bush; one of the fat black squirrels 1 that lives on the church grounds was in the bush. I was surprised that it bore its weight. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[411,40],"tags":[261,297,508],"class_list":["post-6565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bay-area","category-spring","tag-invasive-species","tag-juncoes","tag-squirrel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6565"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6607,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6565\/revisions\/6607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}