The Indian Giant Squirrel looks deep into the camera with his beady eyes. He has his mouth open and is about to bite into a nut he’s holding like a prized possession, with both hands. In that fraction of a second, amateur wildlife photographer Kaushik Vijayan clicked his photo. This was in 2017, and the 39-year-old was on vacation in Pathanamthitta in Kerala. To Kaushik’s surprise, the photo series went viral recently.
“I didn’t expect this at all,” says Kaushik on a phone call from Saudi Arabia where he works in the finance sector. “I put it up on Instagram, and it was picked up by a news agency in the UK.” Kaushik has over 21,000 followers on Instagram. “In Europe, people haven’t seen such squirrels at all,” he says. “These are huge — around 20 times the size of an average squirrel.”
It’s not like they are rare — the animal is in the ‘Least Concern’ status on the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List.
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There’s also another reason why the photos went viral — with a furry body that’s a gorgeous combination of black and chestnut, long tail that curves inwards, and a rust-coloured face, pointy ears and bulbous nose, the squirrels look adorable.
Kaushik got himself a DLSR camera two years ago. He started off by taking landscape photos. “I live in the seaside city of Dammam,” he says. “I often head to the sea early in the morning to photograph the sunrise.”
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The exercise, according to him, was to learn photography. “Every photo I took taught me something,” he says. He came back home and studied it, looked up ways to make better use of his camera’s features.
During one of his photography expeditions, the photography enthusiast happened to take a photo of an Osprey eagle. The photo was his turning point. “It triggered in me an interest in wildlife photography,” he says. From then on, Kaushik made it a point to travel to forests every time he came home on vacation.
Kaushik has made several trips to the forests around Pathanamthitta to photograph the squirrels and has spent countless hours waiting for that perfect photo. In the process, he learned about their behaviour, their likes and dislikes. “They’re often seen atop tall trees, and I usually wait at the bottom,” he says.
He explains that they enjoy nuts, fruits, leaves, and flowers, and are rather fond of sleeping. Their nails and teeth are immensely powerful and Kaushik has seen the animals crack open coconuts.
Kaushik is now shooting something “sensational”, but doesn’t want to talk about it yet. He says, “I want to keep it a secret for now.”