What a vast atmospheric difference 24 hours can make in this geography we inhabit. Yesterday, a balmy high of 24 degrees with high winds, sun in the morning, pelting rain in the late afternoon, but warm, so incredibly warm. Last night thunderstorms, and continuing warmth, during the night when a total eclipse of the moon presented itself. The night-time cloud cover was too dense, though elsewhere the spectacle was seen of a fiery-red moon slowly overtaken by a disappearing act, then its presence slowly revealed.

This morning we woke to another incessantly heavy downpour, and a temperature that had plunged to plus-2 degrees, and descending. The rain and the cold appeared to spur the ravenous appetites of neighbourhood squirrels, accompanied by cardinals, juncos, chickadees and a song sparrow. There was such a pandemonium of moving bodies shuffling among themselves for best seed-and-nut advantage it seemed like a staged entertainment.

First off, I counted seven black squirrels, one red and one grey and a multitude of birds. The birds weren't at the hanging bird feeder; they awaited their turn there, until a black squirrel tired of its antics, hanging upside down from the feeder in between righting itself to scoop seeds, then resuming its acrobatic position again, repeatedly. One little squirrel, black with a red tail, is clearly lactating or gestating, from the evidence of patches of hair missing on her haircoat, used to line a nest. In either instance she needs additional sustenance.

The competition between the tiny red squirrels, the much large blacks and the less numerous grey squirrels that come around is ongoing and amusing. Usually the red squirrels we see in the ravine appear to be dominantly aggressive, chasing the blacks whereas on our porch it seems some of the blacks are aggressive enough to claim dominant status over all the others.

By the time I decided to grab a few photographs, I had been fastened to the window of the front door for so long many of those present had dispersed, and a new horde had arrived; too late for me to capture the absurdly comic behaviour of the feeder-centric black squirrel. Besides which, the stage alters so instantly and so continuously, it's frustratingly difficult to grab the scenes I'm interested in filing through photography.

You'll just have to take my word for it.

And now? The temperature is still dropping and it's gone below the freezing mark. The rain has turned to snow. We've been advised to expect freezing rain pellets, episodes of freezing rain and snow, about three centimetres on a landscape that has just in the last few days managed to free itself from its winter-acquired burden of snow and ice.