Building an ark closer to home

By Whitney Johnson, Director of Visual and Immersive Experiences

How do you document the world’s creatures when the world stopped for a pandemic? If you’re Nat Geo’s Joel Sartore, who has photographed 10,531 mainly captive species so far for his wondrous Photo Ark, you change tactics.

At his Nebraska home for the longest duration of his career, Joel realized that thousands of insects continued nearby in their own world. So Joel enlisted two of his children, Ellen and Spencer, and they spent the next eight months working night and day to document nearly 1,000 species, including the vivid, intricate red-banded leafhoppers (Graphocephala coccinea) shown above.

All of Joel’s photos in this newsletter were made during the pandemic, he tells me. “Most were made in Nebraska, where I live, but I also shot at other places that I could drive to and shoot safely, such as at our family cabin in Minnesota, and at a friend’s empty guest house in rural Santa Fe, New Mexico.”

The effort expands on a mission that Joel began in 2006 with the photo of a naked mole rat in a zoo a mile away from his home. With so many species threatened, he sought to establish a photographic record of such animals, many found in zoos and sanctuaries. “I’d done almost 20 years of photographing in the wild, and I wasn’t moving the needle very much in terms of getting people to care,” Joel explained to us in 2018.

Open for business: Joel and his family rigged lights on their property starting in June to attract nighttime visitors.

Modest travels: The Sartores didn’t stay rooted to Nebraska, but they weren’t jetting off internationally, Clockwise from top left: pink underwing moth (Catocala concumbens) in central Minnesota; common desert centipede (Scolopendra polymorpha) in Santa Fe; a buffalo treehopper (Ceresa taurina) near Walton, Nebraska; rainbow grasshoppers (Dactylotum bicolor) in Lakeside, Nebraska.

A moment's rest: An adult male small minnow mayfly (Procloeon sp.) from Minnesota.

Yikes! A jumping spider (Phidippus clarus) from Audubon Spring Creek Prairie near Denton, Nebraska.

Tools of the trade: In the daytime, Joel, left, and his daughter, Ellen, 23, who normally is selling vintage clothing, used sweep nets through native prairie in the countryside near their home. His younger son, Spencer, 17, who loves to restore vintage cars and is a black belt in karate, also has put in a huge effort on the insect hunt.

Of photography and his children, Joel says, “They don’t like it at all. We’ve dragged them into this since they were kids.” But Joel tells my colleague David Beard that the pandemic has brought them together, and they each love the Photo Ark project and have a newfound admiration for insects, which Joel calls “the base of everything.”

For a photographer who began his mission with that bucktoothed mole rat, Joel takes pleasure in smaller animals and insects. Why? “Nobody’s ever going to give them the time of day,” Joel once said.

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Today in a minute

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Your Instagram of the day

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The last glimpse

Leaping deer at night: A century ago, photographers had few tools to take quality nighttime images, much less action shots such as these deer. Writer-photographer George Shiras pioneered several techniques to do it, detailed by National Geographic in August 1921. The article focused on wildlife around Lake Superior. Take a look below at our collection of animals at night over the years.