See the First-Ever Photographs of the Elusive Mount Lyell Shrew, Finally Caught on Camera in California

High up in the Sierra Nevada, the tiny Mount Lyell shrew has been shying away from cameras since it was first identified almost 100 years ago. Despite being a documented species, it was the only known mammal in California that had never been photographed.

That is, until three young researchers ventured into the mountains with a plan.

To catch the shifty shrew on film for the first time, Vishal Subramanyan, Prakrit Jain and Harper Forbes planned a three-day expedition. Subramanyan, who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, last year, is a wildlife photographer. Jain and Forbes, undergraduate students at UC Berkeley and the University of Arizona, respectively, made headlines in 2022 for discovering two new scorpion species. After receiving permits from California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, the trio headed to the Eastern Sierra. They set up 150 pitfall traps near stream and wetland habitats and checked in on them every two hours.

The team planned to stake out to catch the rodents, never sleeping for too long, because the animals have such fast metabolisms that they die quickly without food—and the students didn’t want to leave the shrews stranded in the traps. They got set up, then they waited.

“I would love to say we spent three days waiting, and the shrew finally appeared at the last second,” says Subramanyan to Astrid Kane at the San Francisco Standard. “But we got the Mount Lyell within the first two hours.”

“It just shows that it’s generally an underappreciated species in an underappreciated ecosystem, that people haven’t spent the time and been able to actually bring dedicated focus to the shrews,” he adds to Issy Ronald at CNN.

To photograph the shrews, the team had to work quickly. They continued to trap more of the rodents, following their planned sleep schedule during the nights, when temperatures dropped to 15 degrees Fahrenheit. The researchers set up a white background and a terrarium for the imaging. “You trap some shrews, you photograph them, you release them, and by that time there are more shrews. So it was pretty nonstop,” Subramanyan says to SFGATE’s Timothy Karoff.

The animals run around a lot—and bite—making it especially hard to get good photos of them. “For every photo that we got in focus, we must have 10 or 20 photos where the shrew is running out of the frame,” says Jain to Sabrina Imbler at Defector.

They took tissue samples from the animals for genetic testing at the California Academy of Sciences to confirm they’d caught the right shrew. The team also trapped three other species of shrew: the vagrant shrew, montane shrew and Merriam’s shrew.

The students hope their work will increase public recognition for shrews and other less charismatic animals. “Many, many species of shrew are known from only a single specimen, or only known from a single locality, or have not been seen in decades,” says Jain to Katharine Gammon at the Guardian. “So if we struggle to find a shrew in a place like California—one of the best studied places in the world—you can only imagine how the shrew diversity of places like southeast Asia and central Africa, for instance, can just be so under-appreciated.”

Mount Lyell shrews are also extremely threatened by climate change—89 percent of the rodent’s habitat is projected to be lost by the 2080s, according to a statement from the University of California, Berkeley. While the state does not consider the shrew to be endangered, it’s listed as a mammal species of special concern. Observing and documenting the animals alive for the first time will help scientists better understand them.

“If we look at the extinction crisis and the types of animals it’s impacting, a lot of animals are disappearing without any documentation,” Subramanyan says to the Guardian. “An animal like the Mount Lyell shrew, if it was not photographed or researched, could have just quietly disappeared due to climate change, and we’d have no idea about it at all.”