With elaborate stage sets and a little peanut butter, Carlos Bueno has turned a scurry of squirrels into star models.
In one photo, a squirrel named Julica poses in front of a gray background holding a camera and framing the perfect shot. In others, she and her bushy-tailed friends rock out on a guitar, balance on aerial hoops, or shoot baskets.
It’s all the work of engineer and local squirrel enthusiast Carlos Bueno, who has dedicated his home and time to the little critters in his Coconut Grove neighborhood, challenging their intelligence and showcasing their quirkiness.
“I’m always trying to create something new to see how smart they are,” he says.
Bueno has loved photography and animals for years, which led him to transform his home into a hub of creativity. Every inch of his patio is a safe space for birds, squirrels, and even mice.
There is everything from a fountain to a “squirrel bar,” which is what he calls the customized squirrel feeder in front of his home on Center Street. (He also calls the power lines in front of his house “the squirrel highway.”)
Bueno, 72, was raised in Rio de Janeiro surrounded by animals and wildlife. He remembers owning a pet marmoset named Sofia during his teen years.
“She was jealous,” he recalled recently. “I used to take her to school but if my girlfriend got close, she’d bite her.”
There were also parrots, a toucan, and a rooster. That perhaps explains why Bueno likes to keep trinkets and figurines of animals throughout his home, including a rabbit statue peeking in a window and a garden snake hiding in the guest bathroom.
Bueno moved to Miami in 1992, then bought a house in Coconut Grove in 2005 before moving for five years to South Africa. There, he worked on a construction project near Kruger Park, the famous wildlife preserve, and met his wife, Karina. He also took photos of lions, elephants, gazelles, and so much more. The park has very strict rules for guests, and Bueno twice landed himself in hot water.
“We got offroad because no animals are going to be on the main road,” he laughs. “Then I was in trouble because I was driving and I shouted, ‘Karina! Open the window!’ But we weren’t supposed to open the windows.”
The couple then spent three years in Brazil before moving back into his house on Center Street in 2017.
Bueno wanted to continue taking pictures of local fauna, which led him to set up bird feeders on his patio. But they were quickly taken over by squirrels and that piqued his interest. “One winter, we were outside so we could see the squirrels all around,” says Karina. “We put the peanuts on the outdoor furniture, and they just started coming.”
The more the squirrels got comfortable, the more creative Bueno became. He drilled a hole into the wall by his window, and began enticing the squirrels to enter his house.
Soon, Bueno began creating tiny stage sets to capture images of the squirrels doing impossibly cute things – pointing a camera, for instance, or playing guitar.
Bueno likes to incorporate themes into his squirrel photography as it allows him to create challenges for his star squirrels. One of his photo shoots was circus-themed. He had his regular, Julica, climb onto a pair of aerial hoops to reach food dangling above.
The setup for these shoots can be quite elaborate, considering he does not photoshop his images and needs to get creative in order to pose the squirrels.
In one photo, two squirrels appear to be shooting baskets. To capture that shot, Bueno used two nuts – one hanging above the squirrel’s head, and another swinging back and forth to make it seem like the squirrel was shooting a basketball.
Bueno drills holes into the nuts, ties them to a frame so they hang above the squirrels, then waits for the perfect shot. Julica is particularly fond of hazelnuts, he says.
Shots like these take a bit more effort, but some can be as simple as putting peanut butter on a tiny camera, which is how Bueno got Julica to pose as a photographer.
“I had a little camera and I put peanut butter on it, then dangled it,” he says. “It took over 100 shots to get that one picture.”
In addition to buying small props, backdrops, and lighting, Bueno also has a motion sensor that will trigger his camera to take hundreds of photographs, which usually produces one or two photos that tell his intended story.
“Wildlife photography, it’s hard,” Bueno says. “Most of the time you’re just sitting there for hours waiting.”
Like other photographers, Bueno has dreams of putting his work on public display.
“It would be nice to have [a gallery], collect and organize everything, especially in the Grove,” he says, “I think it would be interesting.”
FIU students Nathaly Dominguez and Lenny St. Remy wrote this story as part of a cooperative agreement between FIU’s Lee Caplin School of Journalism & Media and the Spotlight.
