The elusive California mammal was captured on camera for the first time in history

According to the California Academy of Sciences, no Mount Lyell shrew had ever been photographed alive before. So they were the only known mammal species in California that had escaped human cameras.

However, that recently changed. Vishal Subramanian, a certified wildlife photographer, along with his student scientists Prakrit Jain and Harper Forbes, traveled to the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains, where they managed to capture several live shrews of Mount Lyell (Sorex lyelli), CNN Science reports.

The idea to try to photograph this mammal came from one of the students, Prakrit Jain, who was shocked to learn that there were no photographs of a live Mount Lyell shrew.

In collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, the photographer and his students developed a plan to search for streams and wetlands that crisscross the rare landscape near the small community of Lee Vining, about 480 kilometers east of San Francisco.

"I'm always up for a crazy adventure. So I said: "Sure, why not?" We have to try it," said Subramanian, who described his reaction to the proposal.

The difficulty of photographing a shrew alive is that they have a very high metabolic rate. That is, if it stops eating for a few hours, it dies. This means that it cannot stay alive in a trap for a long time.

The team set up more than 100 traps and constantly monitored them for three days straight, with little to no sleep to keep an eye on the animals' well-being.

"To find this animal, we worked around the clock to maintain and monitor our traps. We successfully found and photographed 5 individuals and gained valuable ecological information about the species and its neighbors!" the photographer wrote on his Instagram page.

In the interview, he also said that shrews are quite difficult to handle because they bite and are venomous. However, he noted that it was worth it.

By capturing the shrews alive, the team said they were able to observe their behavior, noticing the mammals' habit of hiding food for later or taking micro-breaks for sleep.

Taking pictures of live animals, especially smaller and more obscure ones, also allows the public to communicate with them, helping conservation efforts.

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