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?
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