{"id":59553,"date":"2018-05-26T04:45:55","date_gmt":"2018-05-26T10:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=59553"},"modified":"2018-05-26T04:45:55","modified_gmt":"2018-05-26T10:45:55","slug":"uinta-ground-squirrel-pups-learning-important-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/26\/uinta-ground-squirrel-pups-learning-important-lessons\/","title":{"rendered":"Uinta Ground Squirrel Pups Learning Important Lessons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I was\u00a0very lucky to find these pups with their mother outside their burrow because\u00a0youngsters are weaned at 22 days of age and\u00a0their mother\u00a0almost completely abandons them after weaning. Then they’re on their own so they disperse\u00a0to establish their own territories. And try to survive.<\/p>\n

Yesterday morning after my recent health challenges I forced myself to get “out there” and try to find some cooperative birds. I knew I didn’t have a long drive in me so I chose to go east into the nearby Wasatch Mountains. It was a slow morning and I was bird-skunked but these adorable\u00a0Uinta Ground Squirrels saved my day.<\/p>\n

All 13 photos below are presented in the order they were taken.<\/p>\n

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I saw this very young pup from a distance but “he” went down his burrow as I approached. With all of my experience with “gophers” (Richardson’s Ground Squirrels)\u00a0on the Montana farm I knew there was a good chance he’d reappear if I waited long enough and that’s what happened. It took a good long while though.<\/p>\n

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And soon a sibling appeared.<\/p>\n

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The second pup was slightly smaller and more timid for the entire 24 minutes I spent with them. I’m reasonably sure they’re born in litters at roughly the same time so maybe the one on the left was the runt of the litter. These two were the only youngsters to emerge from the burrow. There was an adult feeding in the grass about 50′ to the left but at this point I had no idea what relationship it might have with the pups.<\/p>\n

The pup on the right fed on grass for quite a while but the smaller one never did eat anything.<\/p>\n

Some time later I was vaguely aware of the adult off to my\u00a0left\u00a0barking out its alarm call when suddenly these two pups dived down into their hole in a panic – so fast I didn’t get any photos of it.<\/p>\n

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In a flash the adult was there at the entrance to the burrow the youngsters\u00a0had gone\u00a0down. She never did join them in the burrow but she was on full alert.<\/p>\n

I wondered what scared them so badly so naturally this bird photographer looked to the sky for an approaching raptor but a bird of prey wasn’t the perceived threat. Instead it was a small group of cows and their calves that had sneaked up behind my pickup in order to cross a nearby stream. When I looked behind me they were very close but I hadn’t seen or heard them coming.<\/p>\n

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This is 3 of them after they had crossed the stream and emerged from the willows. I happen to know that these cows and many others had been trucked to the area (their summer grazing range) only the day before so the squirrels definitely wouldn’t have been used to having\u00a0them around.<\/p>\n

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Once the cows were far enough away the adult female at the burrow entrance barked at them mercilessly.<\/p>\n

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Soon she was able to coax one of the pups back out of the hole…<\/p>\n

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where it joined her topside.<\/p>\n

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At one point she appeared to be trying to push the pup back down into the burrow but it resisted and eventually…<\/p>\n

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the other more timid pup joined them. Once they were both topside and safe she left the immediate area and went back to her\u00a0grazing.<\/p>\n

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Then the larger pup started eating grass but the smaller one would only watch and it did so intently. I had the definite impression that the runt might not be fully\u00a0weaned yet and was still unsure how to go about eating grass and it even appeared that its sibling was trying to show him how it’s done. In the entire time I spent with them the smaller pup never did eat anything while its sibling gorged itself.<\/p>\n

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The concentration of the\u00a0smaller pup on the eating process was complete and intense. After watching them for a little longer I eventually left them and drove up\u00a0the road to look (unsuccessfully)\u00a0for cooperative\u00a0birds.<\/p>\n

But only seconds after leaving the pups I photographed one of the reasons the wariness lessons taught by an attentive mom to her youngsters were so important.<\/p>\n

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Just a few yards up the road I spotted this marauding\u00a0coyote on the prowl. At first it was very close to the road but it was extremely wary of my pickup and it was on the wrong side of my\u00a0truck for photography so by the time I was able to turn around it was a\u00a0long distance from me and getting further by the second. This photo has been heavily cropped.<\/p>\n

At least one source\u00a0I checked implied that coyotes are the #1 predator of Uinta Ground Squirrels in areas where both are found and that surprised me a little – I thought it might be raptors or even badgers.<\/p>\n

Female ground squirrels don’t have long to teach their pups to be wary and those lessons are obviously essential.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I was very lucky to find these pups with their mother outside their burrow because youngsters are weaned at 22 days of age and their mother almost completely abandons them after weaning. Then they’re on their own so they disperse to establish their own territories. And try to survive.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59562,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[374,392,2195],"tags":[3577,4028,3954,1396,2198,311,318],"class_list":["post-59553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-coyotes","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-ground-squirrels-gophers","tag-coyotes","tag-predators-of-ground-squirrels","tag-pups","tag-siblings","tag-uinta-ground-squirrel","tag-utah-2","tag-wasatch-mountains"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/uinta-ground-squirrel-3180-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-fux","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}