On a recent Saturday in June, Donna Gail Shaw trudged through chest-high brush in Anchorage’s city’s Far North Bicentennial Park with a .44-caliber handgun strapped over her pink long-sleeved shirt and two cans of bear spray on her hip.
She sounded an air horn as she walked. She wanted to scare away any animals. Because of her nine trail cameras in the area, she knows that there’s a lot of wildlife all around her.
“I get lynx, wolves, coyotes, foxes, brown bears, black bears, moose,” she said. “I get all those animals and interactions with them. I've seen bears mating, I've seen moose fighting. I've seen wolves that (take) down moose, bears fishing.”
Shaw is part of a contingent of Anchorage residents catching the secret lives of the city’s wildlife on camera. As a growing number of people use some sort of camera to monitor outside of their homes, like security cameras or doorbell cameras, there’s more and more footage of the animals that call the city home.
“What has changed a lot is people's ability to see wildlife, all the things that go bump in the night when we're sleeping or when we're not at home, through Ring cameras,” said Cory Stantorf, Anchorage area biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game.
Shaw’s cameras have captured it all: A red fox she nicknamed Swiper carrying a meal, bears wrestling and even a pack of wolves attacking a couple of moose. It wasn’t until she started capturing footage that she started carrying a gun and bear spray.
On this morning in June, Shaw walked the trails to swap out the memory cards on each of her cameras. It’s been her weekly routine for almost a decade. She always prays before each stroll, asking for safety and protection over the wildlife. Sometimes, she’ll sing hymns to assert her presence, but she said the animals don’t seem to have a favorite.
The Texas-native has lived in East Anchorage for 40 years, and said the wildlife she captures on her cameras makes living in the state’s largest city more exciting.
She shares her footage on a Facebook group she co-runs, Muldoon Area Trail Photos and Videos which has over 10,000 members.
“For the most part, they enjoy them," she said. "And some are surprised by what I get on them. One of the reasons I post stuff, I want them to know what's real close and just be careful. I don't want to scare anybody, be prepared, and then just enjoy yourself.”
Stantorf, the biologist, agrees. He was born and raised near Chugiak and said he grew up knowing bears and moose were his neighbors and to always be alert for them. It’s common to see those large animals in the municipality, he said, but it’s more rare to see smaller ones, like foxes, wolverines or lynx.
The city ran an ad campaign in the early 2000’s that had just the words “Big. Wild. Life.” Stantorf said that campaign was spot on — the green belts scattered across the city are a natural travel corridor for wild animals, which he said makes Anchorage a truly unique place to live.
“It is that interaction, and that interface between an urban setting, and a very wooded setting,” he said. “You have that wildlife moving back and forth, because we have a lot of wildlife friendly habitat.”
Emily Bokar lives right next to one of those greenbelts, not far from downtown Anchorage.
It makes it so her six security cameras around her duplex capture a ton of activity, but it’s not the typical foot traffic most homeowners look for.
“I see critters every single day,” she said while scrolling through her favorite footage on her TV — a wandering bulky black bear, a magpie funeral and two moose chomping down on Halloween pumpkins. “I call it a moose superhighway, just because they zip through our yard a lot. They're just part of our everyday life moving through."
The footage is one of the first things she checks for each morning, she said. If one of her cameras catches movement, even smaller animals like birds and mice, a live view shoots up on her living room television to watch in real-time.
In the nearly five years Bokar has lived here, her cameras have also captured a bear family sniffing her flower baskets and tons of moose, even one that almost caused a collision with her on the “superhighway" that connects her to a city greenbelt.
Her neighbors text each other when there’s wildlife nearby, or when they capture incredible footage, she said.
Bokar said Alaska’s landscape and wildlife make her feel a sense of belonging, so much so that she changed her voter registration just five days after moving north — she knew this was home.
“I think it's magical living here,” she said. “It's not something you go and do on the weekends. It's like every day around you, there's just like wild beasts in your yard. And it's just like a special thing. And it's like something that I've never experienced living anywhere else.”
