Night And Day

I photographed these two critters on Thursday. The suspicious looking squirrel I came across on the University of Michigan Diag let me get pretty close — maybe she liked the camera, or maybe she was frozen in fear. Her more nocturnal friend, the raccoon in the second picture, is a little harder to spot. This nervous furball played the role of dare devil to get down from a second-floor balcony in an alley off of Main Street. I watched for nearly 10 minutes as it tried various routes. At one point, the masked crusader contemplated a straight dive down into the dumpster from the balcony but eventually settled on scaling down a drain pipe. In both cases, it was abundantly evident that these two animals were experiencing a range of emotions and doing some serious analytical thinking about the situations in which they found themselves. Now ask yourself, are they really that much different than us?