The English for écureuil
Feb. 12th, 2006 05:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustOn Friday morning, I was waiting outside the Maison Puits for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler to lock the door and start the car, so that I could open the gate for him, when I saw a squirrel run along the roofline. It was silhouetted against the sky, but I was cheered anyway - and then, seeing movement in the bushes at the end of the house, I caught sight of it again, and realised it was distinctly not grey, from below I was seeing mainly white belly, but surely that tail was quite rusty - in fact, that was definitely a red squirrel.
I was surprised, but it seems I should not have been, and that red squirrels are comparatively common in France. Maybe the logo of the Caisse d'Epargne savings bank should have been a clue. And, back home, Lexis informs me that the French word écureuil doesn't mean, as I'd always thought, "squirrel", it means "red squirrel", to refer to a grey squirrel, you have to specify écureuil gris.
The great compensation for being comparatively clueless about spotting (and indentifying) wildlife is that any sighting gives wholly disproportionate pleasure.
durham_rambler to lock the door and start the car, so that I could open the gate for him, when I saw a squirrel run along the roofline. It was silhouetted against the sky, but I was cheered anyway - and then, seeing movement in the bushes at the end of the house, I caught sight of it again, and realised it was distinctly not grey, from below I was seeing mainly white belly, but surely that tail was quite rusty - in fact, that was definitely a red squirrel. I was surprised, but it seems I should not have been, and that red squirrels are comparatively common in France. Maybe the logo of the Caisse d'Epargne savings bank should have been a clue. And, back home, Lexis informs me that the French word écureuil doesn't mean, as I'd always thought, "squirrel", it means "red squirrel", to refer to a grey squirrel, you have to specify écureuil gris.
The great compensation for being comparatively clueless about spotting (and indentifying) wildlife is that any sighting gives wholly disproportionate pleasure.
