What's Lurking in The Dark?

The most frequently photographed animal was the white-tailed deer. No surprise there: The deer's population explosion is already familiar to frustrated gardeners and startled drivers in the Washington area.

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But researchers were not expecting to find such a large number of black bears. The creatures, in the midst of a comeback of their own, were spotted at 75 of the 273 camera locations.

The photos hint at each animal's personality. Deer stared blankly while the camera clicked and flashed. Bears attacked.

That produced "a nice picture of a bear coming at the camera, and [in] the next picture, it's pointed at the ground," said Peter Erb, a former intern at the National Zoo's Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal, Va. The project was based at the center, a branch of the Smithsonian.

Bears also tended to treat the boxy cameras as scratching posts, producing some extreme close-ups that were hard to decipher. Eventually, volunteer Trish Bartholomew said, researchers realized that they were looking at fuzzy posteriors.

"I don't know of anything else that's that black and furry," Bartholomew said as she walked the Appalachian Trail here one recent day to retrieve a camera.

The study turned up no pictures of one animal that many volunteers wanted desperately to find. The Eastern cougar, a mountain lion subspecies that was native to these woods, is now believed to be extinct.

But the cameras did capture some rarely seen animals, including a long-tailed weasel, a flying squirrel and more than 10 bobcats. Near Mount Rogers, a camera snapped a shot that didn't seem to belong in Eastern woods: the back end of a horse, part of a population of wild ponies in that area.

Overall, researchers said, the photos provide an encouraging portrait of the ecosystem along the trail. But they could still see some impact from encroachment by people. Big animals including bears, bobcats and coyotes were more common in areas far from civilization. In places where the trail snaked closer to Washington, the photos showed raccoons and opossums, at home alongside people.

Occasionally, one of the photos even showed the human animal itself. Smithsonian intern Nicole Daurio remembered one photo of hikers with a camera -- the creature with the most power over the trail's future, caught in one of its most familiar woodland rituals.

"They took a picture of the camera," she said, "while it was taking a picture of them."