Clinging the trunk

The story behind the photo

One spring morning in the Parc de Sceaux, a red squirrel stopped mid-climb on the trunk of an old oak, a nut held tight in its mouth, and looked straight back at me before I had even finished raising the camera. The park is better known for its formal gardens and its château, but it has quieter corners too, and its older trees are full of this kind of everyday wildlife if you are patient enough to wait for it.

The frame is built on two trunks and the gap between them. The squirrel is not centred: it is pressed against the right-hand trunk, and the vertical mass of bark on the left closes the picture like a door left ajar, so that the viewer stands where I stood, watching from behind something. Everything beyond the two trunks is green and dissolved, as a long lens renders a canopy, and that is the only reason such a small animal stays legible against a background of the same brightness.

The light came from high up, filtered by the fresh spring canopy and without any clear direction, and made a soft halo around the squirrel. It fell on the flank and the ear rather than the face, and left the eye in shade with a single catchlight, which is all it takes to know that we are being looked at. For one suspended second, neither of us moved. I wanted a photograph of that interruption: the moment a climb stops and an animal built entirely for vertical movement holds perfectly still. It is a small, unplanned encounter, the kind the park offers often if you walk slowly enough to notice it.