It was a race against nightfall. As he hurried across the sandy, bristling landscape of California’s Carrizo Plain, ecologist Ian Axsom stopped every 10 yards to place an aluminum live trap on the ground, eventually distributing traps over an area the size of two baseball fields. Against the rolling playas and tawny mountains, the traps glinted with golden remnants of the September dusk.

Axsom had no time to admire the view. Then again, as a land steward at the Sequoia Riverlands Trust, he’d already seen plenty of striking skies. “If you spend enough time out here, you will inevitably end up trying to take pictures of amazing sunsets on your phone, and it never quite captures it the way the colors look,” he said.

Three of his teammates trailed behind him, pausing at each trap to insert a fistful of bird seed mix and set its trigger. Finally, the traps were ready for their target: the nocturnal giant kangaroo rat, Dipodomys ingens, a keystone species of the Carrizo Plain.

The trapping was part of the trust’s ongoing effort to monitor kangaroo rats on the Carrizo Plain, located at the southwesternmost edge of the San Joaquin Valley, which stretches 250 miles from Stockton southeast to Bakersfield. The valley is a geographical palimpsest marked by urbanization, drilling and, most of all, agriculture. But the Carrizo Plain is still relatively undeveloped — a time capsule, a remnant of the ecosystem that predated European settlement.

Regular surveys of the giant kangaroo rat — named for its two-legged hopping gait — indicate how the species and its habitat are faring. In particular, they provide a baseline for measuring the effects of the plain’s development, which now includes two solar farms.

By the time Axsom’s team set up the last trap, the sun had set behind the mountains on the California plain, and the group used cellphone flashlights to return to their vehicles. The day’s scorching temperatures had fallen, a prelude to the night’s chill. It was time to drive away and wait.

Read the full article about California’s Carrizo Plain by Shi En Kim at High Country News.