Christmas squirrels - Switzerland

Hi all,

I recently came back from a skiing holiday in Switzerland. While I was not skiing, I was off in the local woodland taking photographs. This mainly included red squirrels but also included some small birds such as crested tits. Luckily, the squirrels weren't at all timid, meaning I was able to photograph them using my 50mm lens, although the majority of photos were take with my 300mm zoom.
The squirrels would often come running towards me in search of food.

On the first day I photographed them, I didn't bring any food with me so they ended up being disappointed. Darker forms of the red squirrels could also be seen.

The squirrels were coming so close I decided to experiment with my 50mm lens. Even with this lens they were difficult to photograph due to how close they were coming.

To give you an idea of the proximity

Later on, I managed to get my hands on some on some hazelnuts, being sold specifically for feeding to the squirrels. Whilst looking for squirrels, I found a tree stump with a sprinkling of snow on and a small fir tree growing next to it. I thought that it would work well as a Christmasy photo of the squirrels if I could get one to sit there long enough for a photo. I placed a hazelnut in a hole in the top of the tree stump in an attempt to attract the squirrels to the stump. It took a while but I managed to finally get a photo.

I later found a bird table in the woodland with plenty of bird seed on it. Here I saw many small woodland birds, flitting back and forth to get food, but my favourites were the crested tits that visited. These were the first I had ever seen so I was keen to get a shot of them. The light was awful that day (lowest ISO being 1250 at relatively slow shutter speeds) and there weren't many natural perches with decent backgrounds. I couldn't set up my own perch so I settled for a small branch that was sticking out just behind the table and stood in a rather uncomfortable position for quite a long time in order to get a nice background. To add to the long wait, my camera decided to stop focussing for a while meaning that when the crested tits finally landed on the branch, there was nothing I could do at all. The shutter didn't even fire when using manual. After a lot of frustration I finally got a shot.

A couple of days later, I went back to the woodland to photograph the squirrels again. Unfortunately the squirrels weren't showing as well as they had done on the first day and the light was even worse. I still managed to photograph them but in a different area. In particular, on a fallen trees' roots. This created some interesting opportunities.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post and I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

All images © Samuel Aron.