Much ado about the shrew | Deserter

Vishal Subramanyan and Prakrit Jain had never even heard of the rare shrew they would soon spend months chasing. Both students were in the same mammal class at the University of California, Berkeley, which included trips to teach students how to capture, handle and process small mammals. On one such trip, Jain brought his camera and took some photographs of voles and deer mice. Curious to see if there were other small, dark mammals nearby to photograph, Jain examined a list of California mammals and noticed that one species, the Mount Lyell shrew, had never been photographed before. “I was immediately fascinated,” Jain said.

Jain told Subramanyan about the shrew in September and the two hatched a plan. Subramanyan, who has since graduated from Berkeley, is a wildlife conservation photographer and creator of the California Academy of Sciences’ California Creators for Nature program. Neither Jain nor Subramanyan had worked with a species like a shrew before; Subramanyan typically photographs giant wildlife, such as cougars and wolves, and Jain typically photographs small invertebrates, such as scorpions and arachnids. The little shrew offered them the opportunity to meet in the middle.

At first glance, nothing about the Mount Lyell shrew suggests that the species is one of the rarest Californian mammals. It looks like a typical shrew: small, brown and furry, with two beady black eyes and a sort of distinctive snout. The shrew was first collected by scientists in 1901 on the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountains and described in 1902 by zoologist Clinton Hart Merriam. Even then, the Mount Lyell shrew appeared to be rare, making up only five of the hundreds of shrews researchers trapped in the area.

In the years since, only a handful of researchers have caught Mount Lyell shrews again. Fortunately for Subramanyan and Jain, two of those researchers worked at Berkeley. One of them, James Patton, a professor emeritus at Berkeley, previously taught the same mammography class for about 30 years. “I’m not entirely sure how they became captivated by this harpy,” Patton told me in an email.

In October, Jain and Subramanyan emailed Patton for advice. “The teachers we contacted received, from their perspective, a truly ridiculous email,” Jain said. “We sent them an email saying we want to go look for it, possibly the rarest land mammal in California. Do you have any tips?”

Patton was happy to share advice, but also warned the duo that the task would be difficult. “This was a rare shrew, known only from very few localities and with only a few specimens in museum collections,” Patton said. He spent six summers earlier this year hiking and trapping Yosemite National Park’s birds and mammals, repeating a survey from 1915. Patton and his colleagues found Mount Lyell shrews in several places in the park, as well as in the Mono Lake basin, at this. Patton suggested to the couple some sampling locations that he suspected might have shrews.

No one was sure if the students would be able to perform the shrew trick. “My general thought when they approached me was that they probably only had a 50-50 chance of getting a shrew,” Patton said. Subramanyan said that while the professors were delighted that the college students had taken an interest in this shrew, “they were also a little bit like, ‘There’s no way these two kids can catch the shrew,'” Subramanyan said.

But he and Jain were undeterred. “We are dedicated to the point where our friends and family describe us as crazy,” Subramanyan said. “They were like, ‘Vishal, you photograph lynxes and pumas. Why are you doing this for a shrew?'” The Jain people, however, had fewer questions. “My family and friends were very happy that I brought home photos of a cute little mammal instead of a strange insect,” Jain said.

However, locating a shrew would be only half the problem. The tiny animals have an extraordinarily fast metabolism. “They can’t survive more than a few hours without eating,” Subramanyan said, adding that the few times researchers managed to obtain a Mount Lyell shrew, they found the animal already dead. Shrews are always looking for their next meal, especially in winter when food is scarce. So Jain and Subramanyan would have to be smart to photograph the shrew alive.

A few other researchers helped the shrew cause, helping students get equipment and a permit from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. They only had three weeks before the first snow fell, which would make the shrew’s habitat inaccessible. They went out in the first days of November with a friend, Harper Forbes. Once at the site, the trio placed more than 100 traps (plastic cups placed in holes dug in the ground) each about 10 steps away. “I suggested they put mealworms or cat food in the cup,” Patton said. As the shrews sniffed around for food, they accidentally fell into the cups, whose smooth sides prevented escape.

Although Jain and Subramanyan discovered that the strong smell of cat food attracted shrews from far away places, the rodents never ate it. but they did eat mealworms, which would keep them alive while the students checked the traps, which they did about every two hours. “Over the course of the three nights and four days we spent there, we never slept more than two hours at a time,” Subramanyan said. “In total, I would say we slept between eight and ten hours.”

Once the students located a shrew, they prepared the creature for a photo shoot: first on a white background and then in a bucket of leaves. Shrews, unable to understand the concept of a photo shoot, do not cooperate in such situations. “The main problem really was the fact that they are running,” Jain said. On one of the students’ previous mammal trips, they tried unsuccessfully to photograph a shrew, which escaped before they could take a photo. But by then they had already refined their techniques. One person would hold a cup over a shrew and give it some food to calm it down, then remove the cup so another person could take a quick photo. “For every photo we focus on, we should have 10 or 20 photos where the shrew goes out of the frame,” Jain added.