Finding Red Squirrels in Frozen Sweden Diaries of a Wildlife Photographer

Welcome to another video in my series Diaries of a Wildlife Photographer. This is an insight into my day-to-day routine in Sweden. I am back in Sweden for a month and I want to maximize all the content I can create. My day begins with creating a fire to heat the water so that I can have a shower. It's not very cold here yet, five degrees celsius. Annoyingly this means any precipitation turns into rain not snow. I had been here for a week now and at first the squirrel forest was very quiet but I have now befriended two of the squirrels I knew well last summer. Ghost! Ghost! Ghost is definitely the most active squirrel in the forest. The squirrels are preparing for winter and are busy cashing the food I provide. As you can see ghost is stuffing her cheeks and not actually eating anything. She will hide and store this food away so that she can eat it when food is scarce during winter. I want to start a camera track project next to the old truck that I focused on in the summer. These water cylinders have been left in the forest for years. I've been leaving small handfuls of food around the cylinders for a couple of days. It didn't take ghost long to find the food and she quickly got used to going in and out of the cylinders. What? Why are you here? Go back to the cylinders. I started this project because I wanted to create interesting content whilst the forest was dark and looked quite dull. Then the conditions changed. Daylight is very short at the moment. Sunrise is at 8 30 and sunset is at 2 in the afternoon. After spending a couple of hours with the squirrels I go for a walk around the lake towards a forest and river. There are many footpaths around here that I know well from the summer. Since there is so little daylight I try to maximise the time I am outside and so I usually don't eat till I get back to the house after sunset. I don't see much wildlife around here but the forest and lakes are very pretty. I'm heading back to the squirrel forest just before it gets dark. Tomorrow it's going to look very different in this forest. It's going to be covered in snow. I have set up a box that will protect my camera. Oh look at that sun coming in. See it? Nice. Anyway, I'm setting up the camera trap for this guy. Come on ghost. There he is. I want them to sit on this small mound. I've got food in a box because I want them to know exactly where to go tomorrow because I'm not going to be here. I'm going to the eagle hut which will be epic but that's why I'm setting up a camera trap because I'm not going to be in the forest tomorrow and I need to leave so that he gets used to it because there's only like one hour of daylight left so hopefully he finds that. It's going to be great. After many hours outside it is now time for dinner and I'm having a spaghetti. I've just chucked spaghetti all over the floor. Tonight we are finally expecting 30 centimetres of snow and so after dinner I prepared all my camera gear and prepared the house for guests as a tourism board will be joining Connie and I in the eagle hide tomorrow. I went back to the squirrel forest at night to check the camera trap and the squirrels had found the food so I'm optimistic about tomorrow. I put the batteries in, tested the settings and placed peanuts and sunflower seeds on the mound. We then headed to the hide for sunrise and doesn't the snow look glorious? A sudden drop in temperature or conditions commonly triggers wildlife to start feeding. There is a good chance we might be able to photograph the eagles and so we've headed to the hide before sunrise to see what we can capture. It's only a few degrees below freezing and so the snowflakes are thick and fluffy but this thick snow looks dark and whilst we wait for it to get brighter for photography we eat lots of biscuits, drink lots of coffee and edit or fall asleep but then the conditions were perfect. We were still waiting for an eagle then a young very hungry sea eagle arrived but after a few minutes of feeding he flew off. We only had a couple of hours of sunlight left and we continued to wait and finally the golden eagle. It was a good day and we even had good golden light in the afternoon. We waited till the sun had set and there were no eagles in the area and we then left the hide. These are a few of my favourite photos from the eagle hide and I was also extremely happy to discover these photos of ghosts on my camera trap. My camera trap was triggered over 1000 times and there were definitely several photos I'm happy with. The following day I headed to the forest to photograph the squirrels in fresh snow. The squirrel forest and the village had completely transformed overnight and the snow had brightened up the forest and was perfect for photography. It didn't take long for the squirrels to hear my call and to come down from the trees. The colder weather had triggered them to eat and they are not caching much food. I sprinkled the food across the snow to encourage foraging behaviour. This means I photograph the squirrels in different backdrops and this increases the variety of shots I capture. I was focused on filming for my short film The Squirrels and Me so you might recognise a few of these clips. After a few days of snowfall it got a little bit warmer and most of the snow from the trees had melted but the snow melting created some incredible formations on the ice covered lake. Soon this lake will be completely frozen and you'll be able to walk across it or even drive across it on a snowmobile. Visiting Sweden again has made me realise how much I enjoy it here and has given me some ideas about the squirrel forest and how I can protect it in the future. Flying the drone made me realise the scale of deforestation here. There are acres of areas that have been deforested for the timber trade and the squirrel forest is at risk. But for now my time in Sweden has come to an end. Thank you to my patrons who make my work possible. See you in the next video.