How to defend the stars
On mountain lions, trail cams, and a local effort to save the night sky
Earlier this year I started checking trail cameras set up in the Point Reyes National Seashore for a nonprofit that monitors mountain lion activity. Every month, I hike to each camera with a backpack full of rechargeable batteries, SD cards, and my clipboard. Once I arrive, I unlock the camera from its case, carefully remove any slugs that have made a home there, then swap out the batteries and SD card. It takes me about three hours to hit up all four cameras. When I’m finished, I drive back home and insert the SD cards into my computer to see how many photos of mountain lions we captured.
I started checking the cams because I wanted visual proof that I share the land with mountain lions. On my first day as a volunteer, I checked the organization’s “best of” folder, filled with images and videos of cougars in the region. A camera set up along a trail I run regularly captured a photo of a mountain lion crossing in the night earlier this year. The cat is there for an instant, then disappears. There’s a sense of awe in seeing the photo of the elusive predator on the same path I run, as well as a sense of safety knowing that I’m now in possession of data that underscores what I’ve always been told: that cougars are mostly active at night and want nothing to do with humans.
Of the four that I check, I always start with the camera that caught the image of the mountain lion crossing my running trail. Scanning through this month’s photos, I see quail and deer, coyotes and foxes, even a bobcat with a rabbit in its mouth. There’s hundreds of photos of empty trail, too. I look closely at these, even though I know they’re false triggers, dancing shadows of overgrown vegetation. I want to make sure a lion isn’t hiding. Further along in the queue, a hiker approaches. At first, she seems not to notice the camera, but then she re-appears from the other direction, leans in for a close-up, and sticks her tongue out at me! Unlike other animals, humans not only notice the camera, they’re also aware that someone’s on the other end. In the thousand-ish photos stored on this SD card, several hikers smile and wave at the camera, one man plays the harmonica, a kid shows off his pack of Oreos, a teen pulls out his iPhone and takes a close-up photo of the trail cam as if to say: I’m watching you too.
Publishing a book or a story or an essay—anything you’ve worked on for a while—can sometimes feel like being caught on a trail cam. You were on your contemplative walk in the woods and then—attention! That’s not a perfect comparison. In the end, I always want people to read my work. It’s just that sometimes in order to get the work done I have to believe I’m alone for a little while. I convince myself that no one else is on the trail: no other hikers, no cameras, no mountain lions. But of course someone is always there: a deer camouflaged in the woods, a sunbathing snake awakened by the stomp of my feet, a coyote at the edge of the trail.
I guess this is my long way of saying: Hello, Substack subscribers. It’s been a while. Thanks for sticking around.
Today Esquire published my essay on the Dark Sky movement here in Point Reyes, a local effort to protect the night sky. Living out here, about an hour north of San Francisco, I think a lot about the ways that technology and the natural world come together. So when I heard about the Dark Sky movement I had a vision of local folks hiking out to gaze up at the stars only to see Elon’s Starlink satellites dancing across their supposedly protected sky. I wanted to find out: what does it mean to protect the night sky when anyone, anywhere can alter it?
In my search for an answer to this question, I spoke with local leaders and stargazers and science writers. It’s the first time I’ve done reporting for a piece, and I’m glad I did, because our conversations expanded the scope of the essay. What began as a story about the tension between technology and the natural world evolved into an exploration of what it means to come together as a community.
Out of about 5,000 images, the four trail cams yielded no mountain lions. Maybe I’ll see one next month, or maybe not. What matters more to me is the possibility of a sighting, the knowledge that these woods, like our air and water and stars, are shared.
