A California photographer recently captured three minutes of high quality camera trap footage of the state’s rarest mammal.
Randy Robbins, whom this reporter chose to feature in GNN’s roundup of the 2024 Wildlife Photography Awards, has been on a three-year-long quest to photograph the Sierra Nevada red fox.
Unlike its mainland cousin, this subspecies may number less than 100, and is at serious risk of being inbred out of existence. It lives high in the mountains and developed adaptations that have allowed it to do so—separating it ever-so-slightly with the lowland population.
Because it is a reclusive and small animal that lives above 6,000 feet above sea level, camera traps would be a key tool for Robbins to spot it. Where to put them, however, would be the challenge, and it required him to delve into whatever literature exists on the animal’s behavior.
“We’re a couple generations away from these foxes dying out due to inbreeding and that kind of thing, because their populations are so small,” Robbins told Fox Weather. “So I think telling their story and getting the word out is important just to sort of motivate people because people care—people want them to be saved.”
Last winter, he set one of his cameras out on a ledge in Lassen Volcano National Park—one of the animal’s last strongholds. A line of rocks jutted up on the other side of a ravine which Robbins knew the animals preferred to walk on when there is snow on the ground.
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Knowing his camera would be buried by snow over the long winter at an altitude of 8,500 feet, he picked a high point, pressed record, walked back down the mountain, and waited until June when the snows melted enough for him to find his camera.
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In the footage, his quarry walks into frame, sniffs the ground, walks to the edge of the ravine and looks out across a vast snow-covered landscape, sniffs the air, sits in the sun, and eventually disappears.
“It was really amazing,” Robbins said. “Normally, what you get is a quick glimpse, like you see a fox running across the screen. This was three minutes of just behavior—it was lounging in the sun and just, you know, being a fox.”
WATCH the video from Randy Robbins’ YouTube below…
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