This shy California shrew avoided the camera and the limelight — until now

A small, cute and elusive mammal native to sub-alpine regions of the Sierra Nevada has been captured alive on camera for the first time by a team of UC Berkeley students.

The Mount Lyell shrew (Sorex lyelli) is a gray, hyperactive, mole-like mammal with a long snout and sharp teeth. Measuring between 9 and 10 centimeters — less than 2 1/2 inches nose to tail — it weighs up to five grams, about the heft of a couple of pennies. It inhabits altitudes up to 12,000 feet in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where it spends most of its time underground. The animal was identified by biologist Clinton Hart Merriam in 1902, but until now, researchers had never photographed the animal alive, making it the only known mammal in California to lack photographic documentation.

Vishal Subramanyan, a wildlife photographer and 2024 UC Berkeley graduate in ecosystem management and forestry and statistics, decided to try capturing and recording a living Mount Lyell shrew. He teamed up with friends Prakrit Jain, a third-year Berkeley undergraduate in integrative biology, and Harper Forbes, a University of Arizona student, and, with a permit in hand from California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, headed out to Mount Lyell last November for a three-day camping trip. 

Braving subfreezing temperatures, they set up their tents outside Lee Vining in eastern California and dug pitfall traps to capture shrews. They had to monitor the traps frequently overnight because shrews must eat every few hours — and if the team waited until morning to check the traps, the shrews would have died of starvation. The three weighed, photographed and recorded video of many shrews “doing the one behavior that they do best, eating,” Jain said.

“It was one of the most difficult expeditions I’ve been on, because having to stay up through the night when it’s like 15 degrees was definitely hard,” Subramanyan said. “But it was also very rewarding. The moments we had with the shrews, getting to photograph them, getting to see them up close, is kind of what kept us going.”

The team shared their measurements and collected samples with researchers at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and the California Academy of Sciences to confirm the shrew’s identity. Jain is an intern at Cal Academy and Subramanyan is part of the Academy’s first cohort of California Creators for Nature, who are paid for a year to tell digital stories about Bay Area nature and communities.

Watch the video above to hear Subramanyan and Jain describe their adventure and the difficulties these shrews may encounter as the climate warms and their mountain habitats disappear.