strawberry roan perhaps

There should be a bumper year of strawberries at The Old Vicarage this year. Unlike last year, there has been more than enough rain, I've managed to organise the runners I saved into sensible rows, I’ve netted them, and laid the strawberry trusses onto straw. All we need now is some sunshine to ripen them. That’s if there are any left to ripen of course, because they are disappearing fast! And the culprit for this, for once is not the chickens, or the dogs, or opportunist blackbirds or even the numerous jackdaws, but squirrels. Every time I walk down to the kitchen garden I see three squirrels. Every single time. And every time they are either eating a huge unripe strawberry, or flying back to their tree house with the biggest one they can carry stuffed hard into their mouths. And the awful thing is, I don’t mind. I don’t think they are very old. It’s almost as though they’ve just worked out the whole business of survival.  And while I see them all the time, they are really hard to photograph, but after HOURS of trying, here are a few pictures, and although my friends tell me there are no red squirrels on the mainland south of Northumberland, to the untrained eye, these are the reddest grey squirrels I’ve ever seen. Hmmm what do you think??

This little one is very grey, and very cute, but there go the strawberries.....