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I’m fascinated by wildlife trail cameras. They haven’t been around that long: They started becoming popular in the 1980s. Then, in the ’90s, they still used 35 mm film. These days, many trail-cam aficionados own three to five cameras, and they nerd out on the footage remotely, from their phones.
A few months ago, I found myself in front of a bulky trail cam during a hike on a public trail. I was being watched.
Ruxandra: “I’m at Picture Canyon Trail in Flagstaff, Arizona, and just came upon a trail camera that’s rigged around the trunk of a tree, and it has a little sign next to it that says, ‘All images of humans will be deleted except for violations that damage city of Flagstaff property. The camera cannot be used without the code lock passcode.‘ Yada yada yada. …”
Clearly, people had been messing around with the trail cam, photobombing from nature for whoever might review the footage. The sign made me laugh. But it also made me wonder: What is it about us humans needing to document everything? What is it that we’re looking for when we look at animals? Is it our own reflection?
Back in the 1980s, in the time of the first-generation trail cams, British writer John Berger published an essay titled, “Why Look at Animals?”
“What were the secrets of the animal’s likeness with, and unlikeness from man?” he wrote, referring to the very first human civilizations. “In one sense the whole of anthropology, concerned with the passage from nature to culture, is an answer to that question.”
And, in a way, I say, our love of trail cams and selfies is showing us a way from culture back to nature. In other words, our desire to document is bringing us closer to nature and to animals. That urge is teaching us.
John Berger: “It appears the animals, Beverly, are emigrating. Their America, the constellations in the sky: lizard, lion, great bear, lamb, bull, crow, hare. …”
That’s John Berger again, but he’s reading from his poem, “They Are the Last.”
A few years ago, I spent a Sunday morning trying to look at animals myself. I went on a hike with wildlife biologist Miguel Ordeñana in Griffith Park, Los Angeles’ largest park, which is more than 4,000 acres big.
Ruxandra: “So, what’s the process of deciding where exactly those trail cameras are, and do you move them around?”
Back then, Miguel kept tabs on P-22, Los Angeles’ most famous mountain lion. In fact, it was Miguel who first spotted him, thanks to one of his trusty trail cameras.
Miguel: “I’ve been monitoring P-22 since he arrived in the park, and so I know basically his favorite hangouts and spots to be. So, I put my cameras in places that, yes, are good practice for trying to track any carnivore, which are trails, funnels, canyons, intersections in trails, places where you see scat tracks or these other signs called scrapes, where they kick with their back feet like this — you might see some up there. And it’s really distinct, and then they pee right there. You’ll see like their actual digit marks. Bobcats do that, mountain lions do that.”
Ruxandra: “Sounds just like domestic cats.”
Miguel: “Yeah.”
We never did see those scrapes. We hiked up the same funnels and canyons that P-22 probably loved, too. He must have been watching us.
About a year after the hike with Miguel, I learned that P-22 had to be euthanized — he’d been hit by a car and was suffering from kidney failure and heart disease. He was an old cat.
This past May, Miguel shared a video of himself on social media.
Miguel: “So, there’s some exciting news. There’s a new mountain lion that has been documented in Griffith Park. … For now, we’re calling him a ‘he,’ because it seems to look like a male mountain lion, but we don’t know for sure. And we don’t know where this mountain lion came from. …”
In the video, you can see the mountain lion standing on a boulder, his eyes red from the flash of the camera. According to Miguel, he hung out in Griffith Park for a couple weeks, but before they could find out any more about this mountain lion, he disappeared.
There were no scrapes. No one reported seeing him around the Santa Monica Mountains like they had P-22. Maybe the image of this mountain lion wasn’t going to be teaching us much — other than the fact that wildlife is, well, wild. It is elusive. It is watching. As John Berger also said: Animals are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. Yet the more we know, the farther away they are.
“Encounters” is a serial column exploring life and landscape during the climate crisis.
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