Mammal Atlas Photo Credits

I received my copy of the San Diego County Mammal Atlas last Tuesday, December 19, 2017. Prior to this I’d seen only the individual species accounts that comprise the main body of the book. There was a gala at the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park, preceded by a meet-and-greet VIP session at 5:30 pm followed by a presentation in the Giant Screen Theater. Scott Tremor, who led the team of scientists responsible for the atlas, outlined the journey from inception to completion of this monumental book.

As Scott told it, the idea began in Y2K when Phil Unitt was well underway with the San Diego County Bird Atlas project (published in 2004). Had Scott known the monumental effort ahead, I’m not sure he’d have pushed forward with his vision, but I’m grateful that he did.

The yardstick that would measure this project would be the Bird Atlas, whose success has been admired by all who’ve read it. Phil Unitt’s skill sets as a writer and an organizer of ideas and humans can not be overstated. Moving the Mammal Atlas forward in the shadow of how effortless Phil made it seem, caused many outside observers to wonder “why is this book taking so long?”. There were several significant differences in the projects. Where the birding community is relatively large (numbering in the hundreds) and somewhat cohesive (organized in clubs such as SDFO and Audubon’s), mammal specialist are far fewer and tend to isolate on specific species or families. Organizing and coordinating these scientists in a single direction was no small task. Some might even describe it as “trying to herd cats”.

Additionally during production of the Mammal Atlas, the museum took on several monumental tasks such as  “re-studying” surveys done a hundred years earlier by Joseph Grinnell in Riverside County and the Mojave Desert. These re-study projects were broad in scope, multi disciplined, and spanned 5 or 6 years (some are still in progress). While I’m not an insider to the politics surrounding museum funding, I believe money gets raised in the form of grants and donations, then all attention is directed into this “new thing”, leaving prior commitments on the back burner. Many outside observers have directed blame at Scott for the slow production of the Mammal Atlas, but I don’t think that’s fair.

I joined the team in July 2016 when Scott called and said the project needed help to round up images for the book. Having worked with Scott and Phil on previous projects, I welcomed the opportunity to participate. My photography interests, while spanning several disciplines, is primarily with birds. To make the book’s images reflect the good work by the authors, I resolved to do all I could to contribute to a quality outcome. Scott had specific traits he wanted the images to display, and there were no images available ANYWHERE for many of the subjects, especially the rodents. I eventually persuaded Scott that a single image for a species might not show all the features he wished for, and I got him to agree that it might be better to have a single “Featured Image”, and include smaller “Support Images” within the text. I accompanied the team into the field and developed the terrarium Scott had been using into larger, full featured “Rat Theater” as I like to call it. I learned to work with the museum’s amazing collections vault when subtle traits needed illustration. None of this work was very sexy or glamorous, but it helped in telling the story.

We looked online for images to fill in the blanks, but getting permission of the photographers proved to be difficult and frustrating. I knew we had many excellent photographers in the birding community, most of whom love to photograph birds as well as things not feathered. I wrote a request to our local ornithology club (San Diego Field Ornithologists), and while we didn’t get everything we need from this connection, we got a lot. For me this was one of the most satisfying aspects of the project, and now we had engaged the community. Many of our best images were rounded up this way.

It is not uncommon that photographer credits are not included as an appendix or index with such a work, I would have liked to seen it. Since it wasn’t, I took it on to create one, post mortem. I think the book is superb and I encourage everyone to look for it in your library, or bookstore. I know they can be had at the museum’s gift store, or online at Amazon.