![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/yellow-bellied-marmot-2525-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"yellow-bellied-marmot-2525-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nThree mistakes, miscalculations, screw-ups – whatever you\u00a0wanna\u00a0call’em\u00a0– caused me to partially\u00a0mangle this\u00a0unique opportunity with a Yellow-bellied Marmot cub climbing a fence.<\/p>\n
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Two days ago I paid another visit to the marmots I’ve been photographing recently. Earlier I reported that there were 5 young cubs in the litter\u00a0but this time there were 6 of them\u00a0out and about\u00a0so I had many subjects to choose from.\u00a0Too many and\u00a0that was part of the problem.<\/p>\n
I had my lens trained on this\u00a0one when I heard Mia say something like “I\u00a0think it’s going to climb the fence” so I knew I’d chosen the “wrong” subject for that particular moment (mistake #1)\u00a0and quickly looked around to see if I could spot which of the 6 youngsters she was referring to.<\/p>\n
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It was this one and it did indeed look like it might be about to\u00a0climb the fence. At this point it had one cute little paw on one strand of the fence and its mouth very near another strand as if it had been (or was about to be)\u00a0chewing on it.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/yellow-bellied-marmot-2529-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"yellow-bellied-marmot-2529-ron-dudley\\"")
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Then it looked upward as if it was planning its ascent up the fence.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/yellow-bellied-marmot-2533-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"yellow-bellied-marmot-2533-ron-dudley\\"")
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When it stood up on its legs and\u00a0began to stretch\u00a0its body to\u00a0full length I knew I was in trouble for several reasons: I still had my teleconverter attached so I was having extreme difficulty keeping the lengthening\u00a0marmot in frame vertically and…<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/yellow-bellied-marmot-2542-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"yellow-bellied-marmot-2542-ron-dudley\\"")
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in my haste to get “him” in frame in time\u00a0I didn’t have my lens level (mistake #2)\u00a0after sliding it across the “noodle” on my pickup window and acquiring him in my viewfinder.<\/p>\n
In the previous images, before he’d stretched, I had enough room in the frame to rotate the images during processing and get the fence level. But now I didn’t so I couldn’t level the image during processing without cutting off part of the marmot (leveling an image requires us to crop out parts of the photo). The result was tilted\u00a0photos that were still too tight in the frame.<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/yellow-bellied-marmot-2554-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"yellow-bellied-marmot-2554-ron-dudley\\"")
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Because I could barely keep him in frame shooting horizontally I chose this moment, just as he was lifting his right foot to climb the fence,\u00a0to rotate my camera and shoot vertically\u00a0(mistake #3).\u00a0Photographers know how difficult it can be to relocate a subject in the viewfinder (especially when shooting with a long lens) after rotating our gear and it probably took me about 3 seconds to accomplish it.<\/p>\n
By that time he had already climbed a short distance up the fence, dropped down off of it and…<\/p>\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/yellow-bellied-marmot-2560-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"yellow-bellied-marmot-2560-ron-dudley\\"")
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given up on his fence climbing efforts. Yes, I was upset.\u00a0In this shot\u00a0I thought he appeared to be mocking me for being too slow and clumsy.<\/p>\n
I missed the very best shots and some of them\u00a0could have been spectacular as he negotiated the fence and then dropped down off of it. I’ve never before\u00a0seen a rodent of any species climbing a fence and I may never see it\u00a0again so missing this opportunity was both distressing and painful.<\/p>\n
As a dear\u00a0cousin\u00a0often used to say in similar situations I “screwed the pooch”!\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps you had to grow up in Montana to appreciate that quaint phrase but for this old Montana farm boy those were the exact words that came to mind.<\/p>\n
You can take the boy out of Montana but…<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
Note: In each information source I referenced the maximum number of Yellow-bellied cubs in a litter was listed as 5 so perhaps this was an unusually large one.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three mistakes, miscalculations, screw-ups – whatever you wanna call’em – caused me to partially mangle this unique opportunity with a Yellow-bellied Marmot cub climbing a fence.<\/p>\n