As a teenager living near Warrington, I used to explore the northern parts of Cheshire on my bicycle and clearly remember seeing red squirrels around Dunham Massey, on the fringes on south west Manchester. I’m sure they are long gone and like almost everywhere else in England, they were wiped out by the larger grey squirrels that had originally been introduced from America. So I hadn’t seen a red squirrel again for 40 years until I started going to the Lake District more frequently.

But even there, their last stronghold in England, I’ve seen them so rarely that I can picture each occasion, one crossing a road round Buttermere, another one scuttled along a dry stone wall in Seatoller, one was high up in a tree in Keswick, and so on. Imagining it must be a hot spot, I would return to the location with my camera and a long lens, determined to sit waiting as long as it took to get a picture, and of course I wouldn’t see a single one.

It was never a big deal – I’m not a wildlife photographer – but something changed over the last 3-4 years. It started with my noting down a few places where people had photographed reds, I’d followed Terry Abrahams’ posts as he worked on his fine Cumbria’s Red Squirrels film, and in Borrowdale I began to spend the odd hour waiting round a couple of spots where some had been seen. Of course, I didn’t catch sight of any, not even a tail vanishing up a tree. It was becoming annoyingly obsessive, so finally this year I simply drove over to one of those places where I was sure to see them, Shap Wells.

All the footage was shot on a Fuji X-T2 with a 100-400mm lens, with sound recorded on a Rode directional mic, and assembled in Premiere Pro.