Super fast squirrel, or just crap?

by Darren

Despite them being the reason so many people seem obsessed with the extermination of greys, I can’t help but like red squirrels too. They behave quite differently and they are a pleasure to watch, even if they do take quite a bit of effort. Also, with reference to this morning’s post, I find you need someone to take your ticks out afterwards as lying on the forest floor all day does expose you to a certain amount of bites, scratches and other undesirable outcomes ……

On the day I took this image I was hanging around with a 500mm lens but for quite a lot of the time it was utterly useless because the squirrels liked the sound of the shutter. A few clicks and they’d come over to see what was going on, getting so close that I couldn’t focus! I switched to a shorter 70-200mm fast F2.8 lens and carried on, sometimes just blasting a few cycles through to keep them interested. Panning autofocus handled the heavy lifting and I was really pleased when I got this image of a squirrel running.

Then I got home and Louise told me it looked like it was an image of a red squirrel defecating …….