Her cameras offer a portal to an unseen world of wildlife on the city’s edge

Most days, Donna Gail Shaw puts on her Xtratufs, arms herself with a canister or two of bear spray and a .44 caliber handgun and strides from her home in a Chugach Foothills neighborhood into a backyard wilderness.

For the past eight years or so, the 68-year-old has maintained a hidden network of trail cameras in the northeast corner of Anchorage’s Far North Bicentennial Park that record everyday wildlife dramas that play out at the edge of Alaska’s biggest city.

Last week, one of her trail cameras filmed something straight out of a nature documentary: Five wolves pursuing a moose and its yearling calf at a bend in a branch of Campbell Creek. The wolves worked in concert, separating the calf from its mother as the cow kicked in defense. The drama ended with the wolves killing the calf.

“I think it’s one of the most beautiful aspects of Anchorage to have all this wildlife, right here in the city,” said Shaw, a Texas native who has lived in Alaska for close to 40 years. “I don’t have to go to the backcountry. I don’t have to go very far. I can be in Far North Bicentennial Park and — except for the sounds of cars — feel like I’m in complete wilderness.”

Shaw says she maintains the trail cameras to offer a portal of sorts, an opportunity for people to view an unseen world of wild animals that live as our silent neighbors, closer than we might imagine.

The trail cameras have recorded hundreds of glimpses into the animal world: A line of wolves walking silently through a shower of golden leaves. Brown bear cubs romping in tall grass. A coyote stepping through snow. A raven cleaning its beak. An ermine darting along the creek. The alert ears of a snowshoe hare. Eagles eating salmon and bears eating salmon as eagles watch. Curious moose with velvety racks seeming to peer into the camera. A procession of bears scratching their backs against a particular tree to mark their scent.

Once, her cameras filmed five wolverines together, challenging what she’d understood about wolverines being solitary animals.

On Sunday, Shaw edited the wolf video, leaving out the gruesome parts, and posted it to the Facebook page where she has for years shared clips of trail camera footage with an audience of about 1,000 people.

The video went modestly viral, shared across Anchorage social media circles. Some people reacted with wonder to see a pack of wolves hunting in the Anchorage Bowl, close to subdivisions and major roads. Others reacted with alarm or fear. The images seemed to astonish people, Shaw said.

“Based on some limited data from Facebook recently, I would say that no, people do not know that wolves live in Anchorage,” she said.

Shaw is a daily hiker who began spending more time on the trails after she retired as associate dean of the University of Alaska Anchorage’s College of Education in 2011.

But it wasn’t until years later, when she met Joe Cantil, a retired public health educator and a frequent user of Far North Bicentennial Park trails, that she glimpsed the possibilities of trail cameras: Through the lenses, you could see wild animals behaving naturally, without human interference.

Shaw grew up exploring the East Texas countryside. Cantil grew up doing the same in rural Oregon. Both say they feel at home on trails.

Shaw says she purchases her trail cameras — under $100 — on Amazon and places them, cinched to trees with a strap. She chooses the spots through trial and error. One particular tree she found was frequented by bears, so it became known as the bear scratching tree. She realized a shallow turn of the creek was a hot spot for bears and fish, so she trained a camera on it. That’s where she captured the wolves pursuing the moose.

Once a week or so — more often in the peak activity of summer — she walks a two-hour circuit to each of her cameras to take out the SD cards and replace them. She prefers to do the task after church on Sunday, and then return home to view whatever footage the trail cameras have captured. Sometimes the motion activated cameras pick up nothing but grasses swaying in the wind. Other times she views a bonanza of animal visits.

Usually she goes into the forest with a friend but other times Shaw sets out alone, walking on narrow trails through densely wooded and brushy areas she knows are packed with wild animals. She sings hymns to announce her presence. Shaw has discharged bear spray at both bears and moose, and has drawn her gun but never shot an animal, she said. She doesn’t walk to her cameras alone in July because of the level of bear activity. Once she’s off the main trails, she rarely encounters other humans.

Shaw says she understands that what she is doing could be considered dangerous. Her family in Texas thinks she will be killed by a bear, she said.

“That is not my goal in life, to be killed by a bear,” she said. “I will do what I can to protect myself, but please know that until I knew the bear was going to kill me, I was having fun.”

It is legal to have trail cameras on public lands, as long as they’re not being baited to draw animals, said Cory Stantorf, the Anchorage area wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Animals are likely attracted to the corner of Far North Bicentennial Park where Shaw concentrates her efforts because of Campbell Creek’s salmon runs, Stantorf said. It’s not an area that’s particularly dense with wildlife, for the Chugach foothills.

Anchorage does have resident wolf packs on the edges of the city, though they are usually two to three animals, Stantorf said. It’s not unusual that wolves would be passing through an area like Far North Bicentennial Park, where Shaw’s cameras recorded them.

“That’s part of their natural home range,” Stantorf said. “The Ship Creek pack has been in that drainage for many years.”

Shaw has recorded so much wildlife because of the camera’s constant eye, he said. As camera technology becomes cheaper and easier to access, more people are noticing wildlife all over Anchorage, he said.

“We see a lot of reports from people who have been lifelong Alaskans and they’ve never seen bears before but they’ve just got a security camera or doorbell camera, and now all of a sudden they’re seeing all this wildlife,” Stantorf said. “It doesn’t mean (the bears) just showed up. It means that this is the first time that people have actually had a camera there, 24/7, to see what is passing through their yard.”

On an overcast morning recently, Cantil and Shaw walked over boot-sucking mud through a bed of fallen leaves, on a circuit to check her cameras.

At a bend in the creek, she pointed out where the wolves had preyed on the moose calf. She knew of an eagle’s nest nearby. She pointed out where, in the summer, a mother bear and cub fished together.

In the distance, you could hear the sounds of cars and trucks driving down Tudor Road.

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