Streakers, Poopers, and Performers: The Wilder Side of Wildlife Cameras

Human visitors to camera traps display, well, human behavior.

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I SEE LONDON, I SEE FRANCE: Barabaig women dance for a wildlife camera in their beaded undergarments.COURTESY OF RUAHA CARNIVORE PROJECT

For more than a year starting in 2009, Amy Dickman had been trying to forge a relationship with members of a tribe in central Tanzania called the Barabaig. The University of Oxford zoologist was studying the killing of lions in the region, and wanted to learn more about clashes between carnivores and humans. “They said they weren’t killing them,” Dickman says. But the data suggested otherwise. “We found over 40 lion carcasses in 18 months. There were huge amounts of killing.”

To learn more, she set up cameras in parks and wildlife management areas to monitor carnivores, and got much more than she bargained for.

One day, she was reviewing footage that appeared unremarkable at first glance: aardvark, aardvark, aardvark. Then unexpectedly, a few women ...

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Meet the Author

Kerry Grens
Kerry served as The Scientist’s news director until 2021. Before joining The Scientist in 2013, she was a stringer for Reuters Health, the senior health and science reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, and the health and science reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio. Kerry got her start in journalism as a AAAS Mass Media fellow at KUNC in Colorado. She has a master’s in biological sciences from Stanford University and a biology degree from Loyola University Chicago.
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