When I’m sitting at my desk I have a clear view of all the backyard birdfeeders, and I’m always on alert for unwanted visitors like starlings, grackles, squirrels or crows. When they appear, my “critter alarm” goes off and I jump out of my chair to shoo them away from the feeders.
I put up the hopper feeders a few weeks ago, and I’ve been waiting ever since for the squirrels to start hurling themselves onto the feeders from the roof of the house. That probably explains how I was primed to see this:
As I sat at my desk I noticed out of the corner of my eye a squirrel on the left side of the feeder standing on his hind legs looking into the sky. But when I whipped my head around and looked directly at the offender all I saw was a tree trunk.
You’d think that after my brain recognized the “squirrel” as a a hickory tree trunk that I and my critter alarm would’ve relaxed, but that silly illusion continued to distract me for much of the afternoon.