When we moved to Clatskanie in the summer of 2023 (more about this here), we knew that moving out into the country meant seeing the occasional critter, but we never imagined just how much this was the case. I am an obsessive picture-taker, so of course I have posts to share all the photos.
At first I assumed that my manic photography of the many critters crossing our land was a newbie reaction, probably amusing to our neighbors. But even neighbors who have lived in the area all their lives have their favorite collection of critter-pics on their phones.
This post originally had all the photos of the deer, birds, squirrels, chipmunks, elk, and even a coyote—but it got to be such a long post that it was a bit much. So instead I now have multiple blog posts with pictures:
- Clatskanie elk and deer
- Clatskanie birds
- Clatskanie coyote
- This post, which shows the chipmunks and squirrels… see below
The squirrels and chipmunks
The chipmunks are especially shy, even of the local birds. They are very amusing to watch as they take a leap with each step across the grass.
We hear the squirrels more than we see them: up in the trees they call out “Pew! Pew!,” much like little kids pretending to be shooting space guns.
Here’s a wonderful picture that Dave took of one of our squirrels disassembling a soggy pine cone:
Here’s a video of a squirrel enjoying the bird feeder, much to the chagrin of the birds:
And here’s a video of two squirrels who were surprised to see me:
The coyote
We very rarely see the coyotes, although we sometimes hear them at night on the hill behind our place. And in the winter we sometimes see evidence of them:
One day in the autumn of 2024, one of them got much bolder and gave us our first (of very few) actual sightings. The coyotes I’ve seen in the past, in Arizona, were much smaller and more gray than this—to the extent that at first I wondered if this was a wolf!
Here’s a short video of a coyote trying and failing to find a way to sit comfortably on some of the junk on the hill behind our place.