Coos Bay

Until this trip through Coos Bay, I never knew they had a lighthouse. We decided to drive down and get a better look at it. It's not the kind you can walk up to. It's out on a little outcropping in the bay. As I was taking shots of it, the car became an attraction to the ever-present seagulls. I'm not a big fan of feeding seagulls, due to the long-term that type of intervention causes, but I wanted to get one up on the hood of the car for a picture. I had a bag of animal crackers in the car and started tossing them as bait. In trying to lure one closer, we noticed there were competitors for the food. Some ground squirrels came up, begging. Tom is a sucker for anything small and furry. He grabbed a handful of crackers and started feeding the squirrels.
They weren't afraid at all. They must be used to visitors thinking they are cute. They came right up to us.
Tom was really excited about this. He had never had a squirrel take food right out of his hand. They did it over and over. At first there was only one, then two. By the time we left, there were four of the little beggars.
I got down on the grass with the camera, to get a better angle. One of those bold little suckers came right up and sniffed my camera lens! I couldn't get the camera to focus fast enough to capture the image of him looking into my lens, but he stayed close by while he ate his cracker.

They seemed to know that the seagulls wouldn't bother them if they stayed close to us. The seagulls were really ticked off.