This winter, having resolved to become better acquainted with our wild neighbors, I bought a trail camera. We’d been renting a cabin along a creek in the Arkansas Valley, and mink and foxes occasionally scuttled past our sliding backdoor. Who knew what other faunal wonders were traversing the property under cover of darkness? When I strapped the camera — a CamPark T20, for the curious — to the picnic table in our yard, however, I captured nothing more exotic than rabbits:
Fortunately, I didn’t have to search far to find a more target-rich environment. Our neighborhood abuts the San Isabel National Forest, and, soon after we moved to the valley, Elise had stumbled upon a bizarre mule-deer graveyard on a forest road a mile from our house. Scattered morsels of ungulate — tufts of hair, bleached scapulae, disembodied hooves — carpeted the floor of a piney draw near the road. Who, exactly, used this gruesome glade as a dumpsite wasn’t clear: Hunters dropped carcasses there in the fall, presumably, and highway maintenance personnel likely disposed roadkill year-round. (A fresh carcass seemed to turn up once a week.) Whatever its provenance, the muley graveyard was obviously a prime place for a wildlife camera. I resolved to document our local necrobiome, the cast of creaturely characters that congregated around the dead.
Almost immediately, my scheme paid dividends. On its first afternoon, the camera caught a riotous corvid dinner-party, a jubilant gathering of magpies, ravens, and Steller’s jays come to pick at the latest corpse. Soon they were joined by an even larger avian scavenger (a rough-legged hawk? I’ve never been great at raptor ID), who claimed the primest position.
Darkness fell, and so did the snow. A fox braved the late-spring blizzard to investigate, followed later by a coyote:
It was an auspicious inaugural twenty-four hours for my little camera, and I dreamt deliriously about the other animals that I’d soon document. Bobcats, surely, and black bears, and mountain lions — and weren’t there lynx skulking around here, too? But the necrobiome at the mule-deer graveyard never really diversified. Turkey vultures, perhaps North America’s most talented and prolific necrophages, came to dominate the daylight hours. Whereas the ravens and magpies tended to nibble for a few minutes and then split, individual vultures spent hours at the site, gorging themselves on ragged chunks of meat, the broad-winged lords of their cadaverous domain.
If birds owned the day, the night belonged to mammals. Foxes and coyotes plied the carcass heap each evening; although I have no proof that the same individual animals visited night after night, I strongly suspect they did, given how territorial canids tend to be. I was most enchanted by a tenacious fox, who spent hours wrestling with a ribcage that must have weighed nearly as much as he did.
One coyote was so enamored of the graveyard that she felt compelled to invite a friend.
After a week, I decided to move the camera to another location. Capturing videos of scavengers at a meat-dump seemed a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, and I was eager to chronicle a different ecosystem. (I also got paranoid about my favorite new gadget getting stolen from such a well-trafficked site.) So I moved the trail-cam into the heart of a vast beaver pond-and-wetland complex on national forest land, a scarcely penetrable maze of willow thickets and marsh where few humans ever tread. When I retrieved it nine days later, I saw, to my delight, that it had taken more than a thousand videos and photos. Surely my memory card was packed with cavorting beavers, mink, muskrat, and moose. To my chagrin, however, I soon realized that hundreds of videos had been triggered by waving grass and rippling water, and hundreds more by brook trout swirling in the shallow inlet in front of the camera.
I spent the next hour uploading and deleting videos of darting trout, and nary a warm-blooded animal — not so much as a mallard. Just when I was ready to despair, though, I clicked open the following video, which redeemed the entire exercise:
As of now, the trail-cam has returned to my backyard, where it’s snapping videos of rabbits with its typical lack of prejudice or discernment. Maybe I’ll soon try another beaver pond, or return it to the carcass heap to register the bears who have surely awoken by now. Regardless, it’s been a real thrill to observe the enigmatic, elegant behaviors of our wild brethren, creatures whose lives are rife with drama and mystery, their motivations and bodily urges so unfathom—