Turning Day into Night

Let’s get back to that shutter speed thing, because it’s important. One of my mini-passions within wildlife photography is small critters, especially endangered ones. The biologist we worked with on the sheep capture back in our earlier days (Vern) did small critter work in his early school days, and one of the species he worked with was the Amargosa vole. Listed as endangered in 1984, not much later it was thought to be extinct—until Vern rediscovered a small population. After the sheep capture, Vern and I did a number of other projects together. One of them was to find an Amargosa vole to photograph. The only known photo before our project was of a vole in Vern’s hand (from his earlier work).

Don’t have space to describe all the fun we had traversing the bulrushes in the marsh to set traps and check them in 100+ degree heat during multiple trips to the locale (just outside of Death Valley), but after more than 5,000 trap hours, we finally caught one. It was a pregnant female, so we know there were at least two in the world at that time. It was a very exciting moment. With it in hand, it was time to take what we call a “record of its existence” photo. That brings us back to this shutter speed thing.