We have a handful of grey squirrels that visit our bird feeders regularly and we put food for them in their own box too. He must have been having his own breakfast when something caught his eye - I suspect it was a neighbour's cat, as later he went up a bit higher and was swearing quite profusely at her sitting in the garden beneath him.
Despite seeing squirrels daily, they don't often stand upright in this manner in the trees. He's obviously seen meerkats doing this and thought it was a pose with some observational value. I love how his left hand is holding on.
Click the photo to see a larger version.I only had my small camera to hand at the time, set ready for some jewellery photos I was working on and the light was much darker under the trees than it looks, so it was zoomed to the max (380mm @ 35mm equivalent) and I could only manage 1/20 second - hand-held, that's somewhat of a big ask for even my steady hands. I wish I'd manually dropped the exposure a little though and avoided blowing the white fur catching a patch of sunlight on his chest.
By the time I'd upped ISO, the moment had passed and he was back on with his breakfast. My very dirty windows didn't help either, so the photo has had some work.
3 comments:
what a stunning pose - the camera loves him! yrs ago we had a resident squirrel in our london garden, who was relentlessly chased by a local cat. he always got away and one day was clearly having a sense of humour failure because as he looked down on said cat... he peed on her!!! oddly, we didn't see her chae him for a few days after that :)
How funny. Ours do a lot of swearing, but I've not seen that. For some reason, one of the magpies really annoy them and there's a face off between them most days - very noisy both parties are too - sounds like a lot of bad language is exchanged.
oh look at him! so seeemples!
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