Hunting Minutiae

MrsZ and I spent a few days last week at her family farm. I was under the weather, so didn't try for coyotes, but did wander around looking for rabbits and squirrels for a while. Scared a few squirrels with the .17 and then bagged one. Reminder to self: .17HMR is overkill for squirrels. Entry wound is appropriate-sized, and the other side of the squirrel is just ... missing. A chest shot didn't destroy much meat, but it made cleaning messier than it necessarily needed to be.

I gutted and skinned the squirrel while MrsZ watched. She's a farm girl, not squeamish about such things, just hasn't done any hunting of her own. I determined that my usual hunting knife was not sharpened after last season (oops), and is also too damn big for squirrels. I've never dressed a squirrel before, so I was paying more attention to anatomy and guts than I would with a deer.

MrsZ asked if it was a boy-squirrel or a girl-squirrel - I hadn't even looked, so I flipped it over and it was quite obviously a boy squirrel. While dressing out the squirrel, I happened upon the baculum. In a squirrel, this is about ... oh, 3/8s of an inch long. I poked at it and examined it, because I haven't seen one before. MrsZ asked me what it was ... so I told her.

She paused, thought for a second, and said, "So you're playing with a squirrel penis?"

...

Yeah. Pretty much.