The Online Power of a Squirrel…

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The Bloke is an avid photographer. He particularly likes wildlife, architectural and landscape photography and his pictures are utterly fantastic – we can be in the same place at the same time, photographing the same thing and he always manages to create something beautiful and artistic with seemingly very little effort. I’m so proud of him, and extremely jealous of his skills.

However, there’s one particular thing that he has an affinity for…

Squirrels.

Living in Birmingham, UK, we have an abundance of them and very little else. I’m enormously envious whenever I go on Instagram and see images of incredible wildlife in people’s back yards – I saw a racoon in Central Park a few months ago when we were on our honeymoon and that was honestly the first time I’ve ever seen one in real life… Perhaps I shouldn’t have stood there and yelled “oh my god it’s a raccoon!” at the top of my voice while pointing at the poor thing like a maniac, but it was a bigger deal to me than most.

We’re lucky in that we live right next to a large park and woodland, and while we’ve been blessed to occasionally see some urban foxes, the odd rabbit and various birds, squirrels are the one thing that can be found throughout the year.

And The Bloke has photographed every single one of them. He’s also harassed the ones in Canon Hill Park – the main park in the city – multiple times. He’s even annoyed the squirrels in London and in Central Park in NYC.

And he’s really good at it. If you live in my area and see a squirrel casually going about it’s day and minding its own business, I can almost guarantee that The Bloke can be found in the distance crouching down and treating that squirrel as if it were Cindy Crawford with his camera. Of all the many things he’s good at when taking photographs, my husband has the ability to make a bog standard squirrel look like it’s had a professional shoot with Annie bloody Leibovitz.

Don’t believe me? Check these out from his Instagram (click on the images for the full picture).

Affectionately nicknamed ‘Walker the Squirrel Stalker’ by most of my family, he has now managed to amass a portfolio of a ‘who’s who’ of the squirrel world in the West Midlands… and what I’ve discovered recently is that these squirrels actually have some secret online power that I was previously unaware of.

Before Christmas, he entered a photography competition with Jessops to win a camera and kit. The theme was winter, and he submitted an awesome picture of a squirrel in the snow that he had taken a few weeks before. Of the 900+ entries, he won! This was his picture:

I was incredibly proud of him and so I put the picture up on my personal Facebook with a bit of info about his competition win (as he is far too modest to do it himself). A bucket load of our friends liked it.

That picture got more likes on my Facebook than our wedding photo that I had put up the month before.

Sunday was Squirrel Appreciation Day (because who doesn’t appreciate a squirrel), so I shared the same picture along with another one on Twitter, tagging his Twitter account in. This was the result as of this morning:

92 retweets and 316 likes. The last time that any of my tweets received that much interaction was when I shared a picture of Bob Ross with Harrison Ford’s face photoshopped over the top, painting a picture of the Millennium Falcon, and I’ve certainly never had that amount of sharing on any of my blog posts in the FOUR YEARS OF DAILY TWEETING that I do from my blog.

I’ve clearly missed the mark on this.

Want to boost your blog traffic? Forget everything that you’ve ever read about marketing, SEO, keywords, Pinnable images, commenting, hashtags, link-ups…

… just throw in a decent picture of a handsome squirrel doing squirrel things and watch your stats rocket!

Oh, and follow him on his Twitter account and Instagram too, where you will be undoubtedly treated to lots of lovely squirrels, and plenty of other kick-ass pictures too!

I’ve just realised… does this make me Mrs Walker-the-Squirrel-Stalker?

40 thoughts on “The Online Power of a Squirrel…”

  4. I love this post for sooooo many reasons. Mr Suzie most definitely has an incredible talent for photography and I was over the moon when he commented on my icicle picture on Instagram!! It was like getting a comment from a celeb! I wish to all that’s holy that we had a video of you screaming at a racoon ha ha. I saw an armadillo in Florida last summer and I made my cousin back the car up down the street just so I could get a photo of it (unfortunately it looks like a blurry rock but hey ho!) x

  5. These pictures make an animal I don’t really love into a furry, sweet little face. No wonder your husband loves to photograph them! I had squirrels invade my attic and it took me a whole pile of money and time to evict them, so unfortunately–squirrels and I are not best friends. But, that said, there’s no denying those photos are pretty grand.

  6. Your post made me laugh muchly Suzie! It should also be noted that I’ve never commented on one of you posts before, and it was the power of the squirrels that compelled me. FYI – We get some excellent squirrelidge down at Cotteridge Park (I was watching two having a right mother’s meeting this morning), so if Mr Walker would like to visit somewhere new it comes with a rodent recommendation.

    • Well hello! The Exorcist would have been so much more entertaining with ‘the power of squirrel compels you’ instead haha! Thanks for the recommendation – he works near there so I think we may be taking a little visit there at the weekends! You’ll spot him easily – he’ll be the one half-way up a tree with the camera and I’ll be sitting on the nearest bench taking pictures of him for future mocking material…

  10. I’m not a fan of the tree rats :), though that opinion may be entirely based on the fact that my attic has once again allowed a family to move in without asking them to pay a deposit or sign a rental agreement. I will, however, grant you that the Bloke has some serious talent.

  11. Well, Mrs Walker…. I loved this! We have squirrels galore and now I will look at them differently. At our last house we had a huge (dog sized) raccoon that would get into our neighbor’s trash during the day. Hubby would go out the back door and holler and the raccoon would head back into the swamp. Once, hubby was away and I saw the giant raccoon in the trash, I stood on the stoop, hollered, it did nothing. I walked down the steps clapping my hands and hollering at him, still nothing. I kept edging closer, hoping I would intimidate him, when I head a splash. I looked down to see an alligator splash into the pond right below me, I intimidated it…, next to the pond was a bunny looking up at me, like, “Are you trying to be scary?” And yes, the raccoon, never stopped eating the trash. I turned around and went back inside just in case the alligator just went to get a friend. That’s my wild life story… Cathi

    • Hahahahaah! Yeah, The Bloke gets annoyed with a squirrel in our back garden who keeps digging at the tree he has planted. The squirrel doesn’t have a tail though, so he feels a bit sorry for it…

  13. Ummm those are totally fab. I’ve been collecting squirrels, for yonks, love em.
    He utterly deserved to win. Well done!

      • All sorts! French crystal, martlet tat, Liberty X mas decorations (that stay up all year), teabtowels with squirrels embroidered on them, cross stitch i’ve Done myself, anything. There is even a stove made by Mørso that I want sometime (I do want a stove anyway) it has a squirrel on the side.
        I am a lost cause, can and do spend hrs watching them, and am lucky that there is a red population not too far away.

      • They are so gorgeous with wee tufted ears. There has been a rise in pine Martin numbers, who usually eat red squirrels. But the greys are bigger, fatter and slower – so easier to catch, and this pressure on the grey population has really helped the reds. Back in the day Ecology was what I studied (mostly) so I can end up being a bit of an anorak 🤓

  15. Do you have any fruit trees?

    We had this great apple tree that produced a ton of apples every year, but our local (cute, photogenic) squirrels empty that tree in two weeks every year before the apples are ready for human consumption. They take a bite and then toss the apple to the ground and move on to the next still unripe apple to sample another bite before tossing that one to the ground until there are mostly uneaten apples all over the ground attracting worms and other bugs.

    They do the same thing to the plums, the peaches, the pears, but not the oranges, lemons, and grapefruit. The citrus fruit league threatened to hire a lawyer because they think our local squirrels are discriminating against them.

    Then there are the grapes. We have one section of the fence holding up this great grapevine that produces bushels of grapes and we never eat any of them because the squirrels empty them out before we can blink. At the other end of the yard hanging on to another section of the fence is the blackberries with all those sharp thorns. The squirrels leave them alone and the blackberries love how safe they are … until I show up with a bowl to fill.

    Don’t even get me started on the figs but the squirrels are off the hook regarding the fig tree. As long as the figs stay green, they are safe but once they turn dark and get ripe, the birds swarm the tree. I think the squirrels are afraid of those birds.

  16. Hahaha! These are fantastic photographs. Squirrels remind me to be more playful and that God has a sense of humor for sure! Now when I see one I’ll think about skyrocketing blog stats and I’ll try to get a photograph.

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