Subject: Michigan squirrels
Date: Mar 13 14:55:36 2000
From: Jacki Bricker - seaotter at eskimo.com




Oh, you are making me SO homesick!

I am from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and yes, the squirrels are a very different
color and girth. The ones that feed in my parents' backyard is almost the
size of a cat; he is HUGE.

If you ever get the opportunity, go ocross the river to Windsor,
Ontario, Canada and see the small, SOLID BLACK squirrels. They are very,
very cool.

I am particularly able to answer questions about birds in Michigan, and
varietal clines of some of the species. I acutally worked on an
NSF-funded study on crow ethology. We banded babies in the wild and
measured their growth until dispersement (2 years of age), and did wild
and captive observations on behavior. It was fascinating.

I can tell you that the crows there do have a higher-pitched call, and
they are smaller in size than the crows out here.

Plus there are the genuine blue jays (as opposed to what people call a
blue jay out here, which is a Stellar Jay--does that drive anyone else
nuts, or is it just me?), and cardinals; neither of which they have here,
much to my chagrin.

I can also tell you that Michigan purple finches tend to have more
coloration on them than the ones out here. Additionally, song sparrows
and juncos have different coloration. According to Stokes, the juncos
around the country are all the same species (which I never knew! I
thought they were different varieties). In Michigan they are the
charcoal-grey color on top and white on the bottom. Very different from
the "Oregon" variety we have here. I think the ones here are much
prettier, to be honest.

So, what were you doing in Ann Arbor? :-)



On Mon, 13 Mar 2000 NJPharris at aol.com wrote:

> Hi, all!
>
> I just got back from a weekend in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I was checking
> out their grad program in linguistics. It's very much still winter there
> (snowed twice), so not a lot of birds, apart from city dwellers (though I
> could swear the crows out there have longer tails and higher-pitched calls
> than ours).
>
> One thing that really jumped out at me is that their "gray" squirrels are a
> definite bronze color, with a golden-yellow underbelly, quite unlike our gray
> and white squirrels. I mentioned it to one of the other students and she
> remarked that Ohio has a lot of white and black squirrels.
>
> Any other trans-continental travelers out there notice obvious differences in
> city-dwelling species like squirrels, crows, house sparrows, etc.?
>
> Curiously,
>
> Nick Pharris
> Olympia, WA
> NJPharris at aol.com
>

-Jacki