All the times we've seen our little wild rabbit neighbour sitting on the porch nibbling away at peanuts, we've never yet seen him carry off the carrots Irving puts out for him to his den, wherever that is now. We thought we had located his winter den, secure in a snow-tunnel he had dug with a back and a front reversible entry-exit under one of our elderly yew trees in the garden. He may have kept that little hideaway in front of the house, but Irving is convinced he's made himself another, more isolated one, in our rock garden that runs along the left-hand-side of the house.

Invariably the little fellow ignores the carrots, evincing far more interest in the peanuts when no squirrels are around in the evening, but eventually all the carrots disappear and we assume they end up safely stored in the rabbit's winter pantry.

The first thing Jackie and Jillie do when they come downstairs first thing in the morning, is to go directly to the front door to peer out at whoever might be there, scooping up peanuts. Sometimes they'll bark at the presence of squirrels, and sometimes they won't. There is one little black squirrel whose presence on the porch trigger's Jackie's indignation. I'm of the opinion that it's the little black squirrel that has a tendency to chase off the other squirrels, even the red squirrels who most often tend to be more aggressive than their black cousins.

The two grey squirrels that come along regularly, and usually together, also have a sharing problem; each in turn will take to chasing the other away. It's hard to reconcile this kind of behaviour with the fact that they're moderately gregarious creatures and there's never any scarcity of peanuts. But they're so hard-wired by nature's survival imperative through territoriality that it tends to kick in regardless with some of these little animals.

We had some early morning flurries, and though the temperature was mild at -4C, there was a nasty wind. Even when the sun came out for hours in the afternoon, the wind still wreaked its penetrating icy misery. By the time we left for our ravine walk clouds had moved back in and the wind continued to sweep the newfallen snow everywhere. At least it has now covered the icy hump we have to negotiate  to access the trail to the ravine so it's easier to enter.

Our street remains an utter mess of snow and ice. It's actually more difficult to toddle up the street with Jackie and Jillie to access the forest trails, than it is striding along the trails that have been well tamped down since our last snowfall several days earlier. Earlier in the week the creek had frozen over again. We'd seen where big dogs have gone down the creek banks looking for open water, their paws leaving patterns on the snow over the ice covering the creek, and the ice hard enough to sustain the weight of a large dog.

Today, the creek is mostly open again, snow and ice melted. And as usual, when the weather has turned mild again and the creek is running freely, there were robins, a small flock of them dispersed along the creek runway, swooping down and around, landing at the edge of the creek, dipping their beaks into the water. And we wonder if they're getting live insects, even in that cold current. Caddis-fly larvae?

We came across a few other people out with their dogs so Jackie and Jillie enjoyed a few encounters. And twice, dogs we know just suddenly appeared, dashing toward us and squatting expectantly beside Irving. Cookie-man never disappoints them. And then when he tells them they've had enough, we watch as they scoot off to rejoin their humans, for as far as we can see which trail they choose and how long we can watch them before they disappear.