What's Lurking in The Dark?

SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK, Va.- In a hidden, wild world that skirts the Washington exurbs, a black bear stares into the camera -- so close that you wait for it to breathe. A coyote freezes, legs stiff and ears up. A bobcat, whose elusiveness is close to ghostliness, is caught just before it disappears in darkness.

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This is what the Appalachian Trail looks like when humans aren't looking.

Starting in the spring, scientists from the Smithsonian Institution used motion-triggered cameras to snap pictures of animals along the stretch of the famous footpath in Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland. They now have more than 1,900 photos, an album of everyday life in the forest that surrounds the trail.

The pictures from the study, which ended last month, show feral horses and domestic dogs, clueless deer and curious bear cubs -- a place threatened by people but still full of its own life.

"There is some wildness left out there," said William McShea, a Smithsonian ecologist who has led the research. "There are wild animals that are living in [and] among us."

"We hike during the day," he said, "and they hike at night."

The Appalachian Trail stretches 2,175 miles from Georgia to Maine, running along the outer edges of Fauquier, Loudoun and Frederick counties on its way north. For hikers, it's a place to escape. But for animals, scientists say, the ribbon of wilderness is a valuable corridor between the East Coast's fragmented habitats.

The goal of the Smithsonian project, part of a new effort to study air, water and wildlife along the trail's entire length, was to document animal traffic along a nearly 600-mile stretch.

Researchers attached 50 motion-sensitive cameras to trees near the path, setting them back a few dozen yards so hikers wouldn't set them off. There are low-tech ways of studying the trail's most elusive animals, McShea said. But they're less exact, and more disgusting.

"Bobcats are everywhere, but unless you find a scat, you're not going to find any sign" of them, McShea said. Using that method leads to situations where "we're all staring down at some feces on the ground and everybody's giving their opinion" about which animal left it, he said.

Not that the camera study was always pleasant. The researchers wanted to be certain that animals stopped in front of the lens, so they drew them in with a mixture of animal secretions that study volunteers called "the stink."

But it worked. Every month, when volunteers would go to the trail to get the digital photos and move the cameras to new locations, they often found pictures of animals curiously licking or sniffing at a stick with the stink on it.