What wild animals do ... when humans aren't looking

SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK, VA.

In a hidden, wild world that skirts the Washington exurbs, a black bear stares into the camera -- so close that you wait for it to breathe. A coyote freezes, legs stiff and ears up. A bobcat, whose elusiveness is close to ghostliness, is caught just before it disappears.

This is what the Appalachian Trail looks like when humans aren't looking.

Starting in the spring, scientists from the Smithsonian Institution used 50 motion-triggered cameras to snap pictures of animals along the stretch of the famous footpath in Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland. They now have more than 1,900 photos, an album of everyday life in the forest that surrounds the trail.

The pictures from the study, which ended last month, show feral horses and domestic dogs, clueless deer and curious bear cubs -- a place threatened by people but still full of its own life.

"There is some wildness left out there," said William McShea, a Smithsonian ecologist who has led the research. "There are wild animals that are living in [and] among us."We hike during the day," he said, "and they hike at night."

The Appalachian Trail stretches 2,175 miles from Georgia to Maine, running along the outer edges of Fauquier, Loudoun and Frederick counties, in suburban Virginia and Maryland, on its way north. For hikers, it's a place to escape. But for animals, scientists say, the ribbon of wilderness is a valuable corridor between the East Coast's fragmented habitats.

The goal of the Smithsonian project, part of a new effort to study air, water and wildlife along the trail's entire length, was to document animal traffic along a nearly 600-mile stretch. The researchers wanted to be certain that animals stopped in front of the lens, so they drew them in with a mixture of animal secretions that study volunteers called "the stink." It worked.

Every month, when volunteers would go to the trail to get the digital photos and move the cameras to new locations, they often found pictures of animals curiously licking or sniffing at a stick with the stink on it.

The most frequently photographed animal was the white-tailed deer. No surprise there: The population has exploded. But researchers were not expecting to find such a large number of black bears. The creatures, in the midst of its own comeback, were spotted at 75 of the 273 camera locations.

The photos hint at each animal's personality. Deer stared blankly. Bears attacked.

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

The one they hoped to see ...

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.

Hit the trail

To learn more about the Appalachian trail, how you can hike it and how you can protect it, www.startribune.com/a3642.