I made a Squirrel Hotel to photograph Sleeping Squirrels

Thank you Reolink for sponsoring this video. This is the story of how I captured my dream photo. For the past few years I have lived in wild Sweden. My neighbours are red squirrels, and I have spent thousands of hours with these squirrels. I have been trying to capture every unique moment, but I've had a photo in mind for the longest time. Although I love the forest and can easily spend hours under the trees, I also enjoy coming home to a warm coffee and a cosy blanket. And I've wondered, do squirrels like to get cosy? What does a cosy squirrel look like? I knew somewhere in the tops of the trees were many cosy squirrels, but how could I take this dream photo? After two years of work, lots of research, my dream of photographing cosy squirrels was no longer a dream. Okay, let's talk about my dream photo. Over the past few years I have spent thousands of hours trying to photograph red squirrels. Some of these photos come from amazing moments, or sometimes I set up photos and I'm inspired by illustrations of squirrels or other photographers' photos. But a few years ago I saw an amazing photo by Neil Anderson, and he photographed a squirrel sleeping. This has actually been a photo I've had in mind since I started photographing squirrels. When I found the baby squirrels four years ago, I always wondered where they sleep, how they sleep. The dream of capturing sleeping squirrels started then. But there's a problem. The problem is, how do I even take these photos? In order for me to get a photo of a sleeping squirrel, I'm going to have to make something for squirrels to sleep in. So maybe a box? How do I get a camera in the box? And because they're sleeping squirrels and I can't disturb them, I'm going to have to have a camera that is remote. So how do I control the camera if I'm not actually there taking the photos? Within a few hours, the battery of the camera is going to die. Also, if it's an enclosed box, that's not enough light. So how do I actually get light into the box? And even if I make this perfect box, how do I get squirrels to accept the box? This isn't going to be easy. I also actually want another camera in the box that just monitors the squirrels, and I do have a solution for that. This is the Reolink GoRanger PT. It's an all-in-one system camera powered by solar panel, and it can actually take a SIM card, which means I can have this running in the box for extended weeks. It will be charged, the images and video will actually be sent to my phone, and it works during the night. I've been looking for this for maybe two years, and it exists. Well, buddy is here. So the first step is researching how to make a squirrel box. I've already got some ideas of what needs to be included with a squirrel box, but I'm going to do some research and see what I can find online. This one has a shelf, which is really cool. I think this is smart. Two entrances. This one even has a ladder. I'm going to need one of those. So I found a lot of squirrel boxes, but not necessarily boxes with cameras. I got in contact with Neil Anderson, and he's given me so much advice, but apparently he used a GoPro, and I want to get a big camera in there. I combined many ideas from different boxes. Juan was going to make the box, so we started to make a plan. I'm not convinced plywood would be good enough when it's quite cold, and I think real wood would be better for staying cool in summer and staying warm in the winter. So you want two entrances? Yeah, one entrance would be very close to the tree. After a lot of discussion, I think we've come to an agreement about how big the box should be. We've now decided that the squirrel area will be 30 by 40 by 50 centimetres, which is quite big for a squirrel box. We have to fit a camera quite high so that I can focus, and also we need to consider that they're going to put up to 10 centimetres of nesting material. And then we're going to have a shelf and a whole separate area for the camera equipment. Now we just need to buy materials. We bought solid wood for the box. In the winter, temperatures drop to minus 30 Celsius, so the squirrels needed to have an insulated box. Squirrels can have a party. The good thing is that these lights aren't too intense. I started to test the camera and LED lights in a prototype box. So I'm going to set up the Reolink camera, and it's just started raining, but that doesn't matter because it's waterproof and it's a really durable design. I've already installed the sim card and I now have it on my phone and the thing I really like about it is that I can rotate it. How cool is that? The GoRanger PT offers 360 degree all-round view. This means you can cover a wide area from a single location. I really loved having the Reolink camera set up at the feeding station. It made me realize how important it is to provide fresh water for the wildlife. The solar panel works incredibly well and the 4k footage is clear even at night. The app is also really easy to use and you can download videos directly from the app. You can also upload your recorded 4k videos to the Reolink cloud. I highly recommend these Reolink cameras for monitoring wildlife and if you're interested, head to the link in the description to find out more. Today is a special day. We're going to start building the box. This is our neighbor Anders who kindly helped us with cutting the wood. Anders has lots of different tools and machines and this was definitely a lot quicker than using a handsaw. We actually started this project over a year ago but when Roo came into our life last spring, our focus was completely on her and of course Roo lived in my hoodie for several weeks before she went outside. I used this toy squirrel to work out the distance for the shelf where the camera section will be. I needed to use a lens with a wide aperture since inside the box would be quite dark. We created a custom mount for the Canon R5 and the Reolink GoRanger PT. The plan was to focus on monitoring the squirrels with the Reolink camera and to only focus on the Canon camera footage occasionally. The reason for this is because the Canon camera will get a bit too warm when running constantly and also the LED lights needed to be turned on. With the Reolink, I don't need LED lights as it has no glow infrared LEDs and I can also check back the video footage anytime but the Canon R5 will help me get high quality photos. We created an attractive front panel for the box with the idea that I can photograph the squirrels with their head peeking out the entrance. It was time for the final touches and here is the reveal. So here is the finished squirrel box. It took us much longer than expected to finish. We had lots of problems come up and we had to find different solutions. We might not actually get squirrels in there for months, maybe a year, but for a squirrel to give birth, I think she would love this. She has space with her kits. I've already prepared the box with lichen and nesting material and fingers crossed we have some squirrels move in. And then a few weeks later something magical happened. Three squirrels moved in. I'm going to share the story of how these squirrels moved in in a future video because it was an unexpected beautiful story. What an absolute privilege it is to watch squirrels sleeping. When I was taking these videos I was melting with the cuteness. Squirrels do truly like to snuggle up and get cozy. So this is what you actually see with my R5 and in the future I think I will build wood around the inside of the box to better frame the photo. Most of the time the squirrels wanted to sleep in a corner. Squirrels actually spend a lot of time sleeping. It was very interesting to watch them because individuals had different bedtime routines. One would leave in the middle of the night for a few minutes and would then quickly snuggle back with the other squirrels. They often would sleep on top of each other and they groomed their fur every night. The Reolink was in the box for the majority of the time. It was perfect in monitoring the squirrels. I will go into detail how the box and camera system works but first let me show you my dream photo of not one but three sleeping squirrels. To be honest I'm ecstatic that this even worked and I'm very excited for the future of this project. My new dream is to document a female squirrel raising her kits and I am very excited to announce that this photo is the front cover of my Red Squirrels 2025 calendar which is now available to pre-order on my website. All pre-orders made in the first week will get various free goodies including a bookmark, greeting cards and a Roo sticker. Pre-orders help me invest into buying all the calendars so massive thank you to everyone who purchases so early. I thought I'd explain how the camera works in the box and how I'm able to control it because I'm actually controlling it via the internet with another computer. So in the squirrel box I have my camera and then next to it there is another smaller box and within that box is a mini computer, electricity for the LED lights, electricity for my camera and a mini router with a sim card and that means I can control the camera online via the internet basically anywhere. It's very clever and I wouldn't have been able to work this out on my own. Now let me show you how it actually works. So this is the EOS utility and I click on remote shooting and now I have access to my camera. I'm going to begin with taking some photos. There are no squirrels inside it at the moment but I can move the focus, I can zoom in and this is particularly helpful for resetting the focus. So because I want the light in the box to be low and not too bright, I have only a couple of LED lights in there. I'm using a very low shutter speed, a relatively high ISO and then when I want to shoot video I'm shooting at 23 frames a second and that means I can have my shutter speed quite low. Because it is over the internet there is a bit of a delay and I've missed a few shots. If I'm working on my computer I have this monitor open with the squirrels and then to record video I click on the video button and here it is ready with video. This whole process has been fascinating because I'm basically controlling a camera remotely over the internet and I can't return back to the camera because obviously it will disturb the squirrels. I need to be there when they're not inside, have everything set up and I can't return until the squirrels leave again. It is such a pleasure to be in a squirrel dray and see what they do and it's probably one of the most ambitious and creative projects that I've managed to pull off and I'm very happy with the photos. These Reolink cameras have been so fun and quite useful especially to know when the squirrels are active and when they're coming to eat. If you're interested in following the wildlife in your garden head to the link in the description and you can find out more about the Reolink cameras.