Animal Paparazzi
When you visit an ATM to stock up on twenties, the camera sees. When you buy gum at the 7-Eleven, the camera sees. When you flap your wings and land next to a deer carcass in the midst of hillside chaparral, the camera catches that, too. You, in the last instance, would be a turkey vulture. It’s 1999, and Big Brother is everywhere, even in the scrubby Santa Monica Mountains, where benign but intrusive science hopes to learn if native carnivores--gray foxes, coyotes, bobcats and mountain lions--can sucessfully endure in a shrinking, checkerboarded habitat.
Since 1996, a team of ecologists, college students and park scientists has stationed inexpensive point-and-shoot cameras in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in and around Calabasas and Agoura. The project, conducted jointly by the National Park Service, the University of Massachusetts, UC Davis, UCLA and Cal State Northridge, studies parkland parcels of varying sizes to help biologists compare the numbers of carnivore populations within each.
For researchers, the first challenge was to get the animals to take their own pictures. Eventually they found the right smelly bait to lure the creatures across camouflaged plexiglass pressure plates wired to camera shutters. Now they’re creating an archive of an obscure genre of photography: animal self-imaging. The study seeks answers to questions such as: Do gray foxes flourish on islands of natural land surrounded by SUVs and mini-mansions? How many bobcats can a tiny remnant of oak savannah support? Do mountain lions use a culvert to travel back and forth under the 101 Freeway?
The researchers, who have now examined hundreds of rolls of film, may find non-carnivore photos superfluous in their study. But inevitably the same essence of road kill and fish oil spread that brings in the targeted species pulls in a parade of creatures that also trips the shutters, creating stacks of bizarrely composed and badly lit portraits that seem extraordinarily private and, at times, taboo. Even the occasional oblivious human gets in the frame. It’s the “Wild Kingdom,” shot up close by the subjects themselves.
From a mytho-historical perspective, many centuries after artists around the world started making cave paintings of sacred animals, the sacred animals have walked off the walls to join in making pictures of themselves. Those involved in the project hope the photos will provide scientific evidence to support saving open spaces, but it raises some unusual issues. What does it mean that we have tricked animals into becoming their own paparazzi? It’s as if the essential Zen koan--the one about a tree falling and no one hearing it--has been sidestepped by seeding the forest with listening devices. Does a hungry coyote in Cheeseboro Canyon have privacy rights?
