Gotcha

In photographing our surroundings Cyndee and I have captured tiny lizards scurrying across the desert, raptors nesting and on the wing, hummingbirds darting around, bears on a mountain, deer and turkey picking their way through dense forest.  But one critter that has eluded our camera is the Kaibab Squirrel.

The Kaibab Squirrel is rare, existing only on the Kaibab Plateau and then only where the ponderosa pine grow.  The population of them is pretty high in North Rim Campground but you could not tell it by the photos taken of them.  These squirrels are wary of anything that moves and keep themselves at distance from anything not a ponderosa pine.  Even when they do finally come down to forage they are in constant motion, making it near impossible to get them framed up and a good lock on focus.

After three months of chasing them around last season I have several dozen photos of blurry, gray shapes.  And even when I got close enough to use a flash to "freeze" the action, the results wear unappealing.  Don't ask me why but the harsh light of the flash made them look like devil-spawn.

But perseverance pays off.  And being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time helped a lot too.  We have a squirrel that must have nested in a tree this winter directly across the street from our campsite.  Cyndee had been noticing him making routine visits to the ground to dig up some of his cache.  And doing something not typical, sitting right there and eating it.

So during one of our lunch breaks I got the camera out when we saw him coming down his tree, right on schedule.  He dug up a big nut he had buried months before and much to my surprise sat right there and began eating it.  I started snapping shots from a long way off but moved one step closer with each set of frames.  FINALLY, after all the too distant, too blurry, too dark and too just no good shots, I finally got a couple I am not embarrassed to post.

Kaibab Squirrel
Tufts of hair on ears is a winter thing.  It will all be gone by the end of June.

When moving through the forest the body of the squirrel is almost invisible but the tail is highly visible as it undulates along.  We tell visitors to just look for the dinner napkin moving along the ground to find a squirrel.

Another critter that I have been less than successful at capturing is the Majestic Hummingbird.  I displayed a shot in an earlier post but it was not much better than a silhouette.  We soon found that, like the Kaibab Squirrel, the hummingbird had a routine too.  He seemed to pass through each afternoon at about 3:00pm.  With camera on tripod and pointed in the general direction of one of his stops, I waited.  If he appeared all I would have to do was push the shutter button.

Like clock-work he showed up.  I reached up and held the button down, shooting 5.6 frames per second hoping that he would move into the direct sunlight for at least one shot.  And he did, sort of.

In his ten second appearance I peeled off 50 frames and this is the only one worth sharing.

He briefly moved into light, enough so that the blue on his throat lit up and some green on his belly began to show.  But he never turned his head just right to show off the intense purple cap on his crown.

The turkey that were so plentiful last season have not been seen so far.  On our next days off we may go to a couple of the little clearings and meadows we know about some five miles away to see if we can track them down.