So, full disclosure: By my standards, this actually isn't that weird. It's the type of thing I would really end up doing anyway, but to some other people it may be considered a bit on the odd side...

I work as a zoologist, and a few months back, I encountered an animal in the field which I'd been wanting to meet for a very long time. An elephant-shrew aka Cape Rock Sengi:

Having a hard time spotting him?

The first time I saw one of these I literally ended up hanging over a boulder, upside-down staring into the crack he'd disappeared into and seeing only twitching whiskers in the dark... Of course, I was already enchanted. After a couple more encounters, I hatched my Steemit mission: I was going to film one of these damn things, narrate it and post it on Steemit.

So I started hanging out near suspicious crevices, looking for tell-tale (often actual tail) signs of my quarry. As it turned out, elephant shrews are more cunning than people or at least me. They are an absolute bugger to sneak up on. And inevitably, every encounter would place them halfway up a damn cliff that I would have to climb over or down, or hang out on a rock ledge underneath of to try and get any footage.

The Hunt

I quickly figured out using anything bigger than a phone instantly spooked them and that I was basically going to have to sit very still in a variety of incredibly uncomfortable positions if I was going to have any hope of accomplishing my task. I found one fellow early on a particularly promising morning and tried to sneak up on him several times. Every time I rounded the rock he was behind (which I could only do basically by climbing it) he would disappear under it, in sight but too far in the shadow to be filmed. Somewhere around the sixth time, he mockingly sat just out of camera sight and did the most incredible face clean with his ridiculously long and sticky tongue. I'm pretty sure he was taunting me. What can I say, work with them long enough and you realise that all animals are basically assholes. I tried to ambush this particular shrew a couple more times over the next few weeks but never successfully.

A few weeks passed and I caught glimpses of shrews here and there in jumbles of rock but nothing concrete, nothing I could work with. Then, on an utterly unexpected morning, one of my colleagues (with a long suffering look) informed me: "There's an Ellie shrew under that rock back there. Keeps popping out to look at me."
Right, jackpot. Here was a shrew that wasn't up a cliff or in an impossible rock maze. I positioned myself on top of his rock as quietly as possible and waited. And waited...and whiskers at my two o clock and that ridiculous little elephant snout whiffling away. I started filming and the rest came together beautifully, with the little guy ducking out from cover a couple of times as I talked and finally getting caught on camera. You can check out the whole thing here:

https://steemit.com/steemstem/@holothewise/field-encounters-on-the-trail-of-the-elephant-shrew-original-footage
(My alt account)

Well, the footage may not be amazing but the process of hunting one of these amazing little animals down was absolutely worth it. I never did get the chance to film some more natural behaviour such as foraging or grooming as our field site burned down (you can read about it @holothewise), but I was very happy with the little I managed and gained a hell of a lot of respect for people who do this type of filming for a living.

Anyway, that was definitely the weirdest Steemit-specific undertaking so far (check out the contest here: https://steemit.com/steemitmademedo/@mermaidvampire/look-what-steemit-made-me-do-a-contest)
Happy Steeming People
The Wise Fox