the trouble with triplets

Bright blossoms, buzzing bees, and airborne butterflies may get top billing as the icons of spring, but, around here, busy bonny babies are always--however briefly--the stars of the season. Spotting squirrels, both familiar and new, is an almost daily occurrence at our home, but a trio of wide-eyed, scrawny-tailed juveniles just out of the tree is one for the books. Of course we can't know with absolute certainty that these three are biological siblings, but they are all the same size--so tiny, they haven't even grown into those big peepers yet--and they all appeared on our front porch the same day, together.

Some people insist that bad things, that tragedies, always come in threes. I'd say everything comes in threes, so long as you reset the count to nùmero uno before you reach a tally of four. However you look at it, our latest wildlife wonders provide compelling argument that good things come in threes as well.

At the rate these little sweeties are inhaling birdseed and suet from our feeders, they'll soon be fully grown and nearly indistinguishable from our other gray squirrels. In the meantime, we'll revel in their antics for as long as we can. The trouble with triplets isn't that they get into three times the mischief or make three times the mess, though both of those statements are true. (We don't mind.) No, the difficulty lies in photographing them. With patience, achieving a decent shot of one through a window is a realistic aspiration. Sharply capturing two or three whirling, hungry, playful, frenetic balls of energy simultaneously is less likely to happen than asking a hurricane to sit for an oil painting...and, in return, receiving its tranquil and respectful compliance.

So, here's a photo of one. (Squirrel, not hurricane, though there have been instances in which such misidentification could easily have been made.) Look at that coiled tail, that soulful, curious eye, that tiny but agile body comfortably seated in a swaying saucer of nibble-worthy nosh. Now imagine the sight in triplicate. Three times the mischief. Three times the mess. And utterly, gleefully, wholly undeniably three times the cute.