Wildlife Filmmaker Places Ten Sony Cameras Around Red Squirrel’s Food Stash, Bears Ensue

Photo credit: Jake Davis
Wildlife filmmaker Jake Davis placed ten high-end Sony cameras around a red squirrel’s food stash in Yellowstone’s high-elevation woodlands. This project had been years in the making, beginning with a simple desire to film grizzly bears and eventually turning into a deep curiosity with the intricate web of life that revolves around a single resource: whitebark pine cones.

For red squirrels, late summer is all about harvesting those cones, which are packed with dozens of seeds that are about as good as it gets in terms of fat and protein, a calorie-dense little package they bury in their middens, which are piles of debris and soil that serve as secret winter pantries. These little guys (and they are really small) are working nonstop, dragging heavy, sticky cones along well-worn trails and stashing them under logs or in the ground. It’s impossible not to be impressed by their efforts, which result in a small food stockpile that attracts a variety of creatures.

Then the bears appear, and the entire scene transforms as the heat sensors trigger all of the cameras at once, resulting in a 360-degree video of the entire stash, including a camera installed in a tree that provides a squirrel’s eye perspective. A grizzly approaches, snout to the ground, its noisy sniffing causing the microphones to pick up even the smallest of breaths. The bear digs around in the logs and earth, tearing through the midden like it’s nobody’s business, hunting for the buried cones.

Several bears came through over time, often two or three in one day. Then there’s one bear who continues coming back, even after suffering major injuries. There’s a bear named Paula who turns up with a lost front paw and toes that appear to have been struck off by a trap. You wouldn’t know it by the way she forages; she just goes about her business. And she even has healthy cubs, which is very wild.

The squirrels respond to all of this with alarm calls and courageous little attempts to scare the bears away. One of them even makes a brave little rush, hopping in to try to scare the bear away but getting tossed aside in the process, but the little guy is fine, and it scrambles away unhurt before returning to continue defending its cache. Other critters begin to show up at the party, as martens chase the squirrel, weasels dart around in the wreckage, and owls fly in at dark to investigate what all the hoopla is about. Even the most nocturnal species, such as snowshoe hares and porcupines, come out at night to eat scraps. The deer mice scurry out when the bears knock around the midden.
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