Hey There Little Fella

Our neighbors have an orange tree. It's wonderful for us because they don't mind when we reach over the fence to pick some from time to time (and they're quite tasty). Every once in a while though when we go outside we find these partially eaten oranges in our backyard

And little orange shavings sprinkled about as well

We've always wondered what the hell was dissecting the oranges. Best case scenario was that it was a neighborhood cat as they tend to wander around our yard frequently. But I've never seen a cat eating oranges, so I didn't think that was much of a possibility.

Two not so fun orange eating possibilities were a rat or a raccoon. Growing up in Albany (a very small town between Berkeley and Richmond) and Berkeley there were raccoons EVERYWHERE. They were always in our backyard and were especially fond of terrorizing our rabbits. A couple times the rabbits woke my dad up with their in-fear foot thumping and my dad went outside and threw a beer bottle at them and actually knocked a mama raccoon out one time. As a ten year old I found this absolutely hilarious. It wasn't nearly as funny when recycling wasn't at hand and my dad would throw our soccer cleats at them though.

Anyways, despite the ever present raccoons when I was little, we actually don't have too many around here (though one time there was one in our front yard and our friend went chasing it down the street to our laughter).

So it has remained a mystery. Until now.

We were working in the garage a couple days ago when we saw a little critter run across the fence, hop into the orange tree, climb around looking for the most tasty orange it could find, pull it off the branch, carry it in its mouth to the top of the fence where he proceeded to gnaw and peel the orange

It was a SQUIRREL!

Chris and I stood there laughing at his feverish peeling and I proceeded to giggle as I stepped closer and closer to him

He probably let me get about 2 ft. away from him

And I made one more step

...and he decided that was too close and he picked up the orange in his mouth and ran away. I wish I had gotten a picture of him with it in his mouth because it looked pretty hilarious, but Chris and I were too busy laughing.

Now we know what little critter is stealing the neighbor's oranges.