Every day, there are acrobatic extravaganzas going on above our heads in the form of squirrel parkour. On SquirrelAppreciationDay, read the story on how some of those feats were captured for this 6 August 2021 cover:
You probably don’t expect much sports coverage in a publication named. So, it might have come as a surprise to see the small but remarkable athletic feat on the cover of , coinciding with a somewhat larger sporting event in Tokyo.
Unlike the human Olympians, the impressive jump on our cover was performed by a squirrel.. To obtain images of squirrel agility, the research team had to concoct their own strategies. The initial images—still frames taken from video—captured the furry athletes but lacked the sharpness and resolution needed for a successful cover.I spoke with investigators Nathaniel Hunt and Robert Full, who introduced me to University of California, Berkeley, doctoral candidate Lawrence Wang, leader of the squirrel documentation project. I outlined what we needed for a successful cover—high-resolution still photos, lighting changes to better illuminate the squirrels, and a black background for more visual drama. Over multiple attempts, Lawrence and his team refined their efforts to produce the final cover image. Below, he describes the challenges his team faced in working with the squirrels and capturing their fleeting leaps. The following comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.Q: Where do you photograph the squirrels?We work outdoors in a small, wooded area of the campus called the Eucalyptus Grove. Berkeley’s campus has a big fox squirrel population, and many people feed them. That helps us, as they are used to people. They're all volunteers. We draw them to the setup with a combination of nuts and tongue clicks when we train them to jump on the setup. We use a nontoxic fur dye to mark them, which helps us distinguish individuals. We keep a log of participants, and that helps us know which ones have already done certain tasks and which ones have not.Some take to it more quickly than others and are ready to try new things. There are strong individual differences. But it comes down to trial and error. Q: How do they learn to jump?Once they come close to the setup, we put nuts on sticks and use them to lure the squirrels onto it. We use that to lure them back and forth between locations for jumps, rewarding them with a nut.We started with a metal wall that we prepared in the lab. That bolted onto a wooden structure so that we could attach different magnetic platforms and move them around. We used a white background for the initial setup.Q: How did your approach change in getting to the final picture?We needed to shoot at a fast shutter speed to get sharp pictures of the squirrel in midjump. We began using sunlight as our primary light source, but that produced harsh shadows. So, we used sheets of diffusing material to soften the light. But that meant we needed artificial lighting. We brought in external batteries for the lights, as we don't have electric power out in the Grove. Of course, with all those preparations, if the squirrels are not interested in jumping then nothing happens. Sometimes we’d go an entire week without being able to get any shots.Squirrels are very smart and adapt quickly to changes. They are amazing at figuring out how to jump. The squirrels can rapidly learn how to jump on our setup, even at very long distances, and can strike a good balance between risk and reward when deciding whether and how to jump. We also learned that no matter how perfect your setup, there’s always a big luck component when working with wild animals.Bill Douthitt is the Photography Managing Editor at
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