How did the photo come about?

One of my roles at the Natural History Museum of L.A. County is to map L.A. wildlife in underrepresented and under-served neighborhoods in L.A. Also, carnivores and other nocturnal species are poorly documented in the urban core of Los Angeles. Audubon Center staff and dedicated birders have done an excellent job at keeping track of the birdlife in the park via eBird and iNaturalist but I wanted to see what nocturnal predators were using the park. Although the park is pretty small, isolated, and crisscrossed by human trails, I knew that the park had great potential for supporting some pretty cool carnivores. I know that few unoccupied habitat fragments remain for territorial carnivores in urban Los Angeles so any suitable habitat with a potential connection to larger habitat has a good chance of harboring an adaptive and lucky carnivore. Also, I can now only discount a few L.A. urban wildernesses as potential carnivore habitats after discovering P-22 in Griffith Park. In this case, the glimmer of hope for habitat connectivity comes in the form of a concrete channel called the Arroyo Seco.

The Arroyo Seco is a seasonal waterway that connects the San Gabriel Mountains to the Los Angeles River confluence near Elysian Park. I approached Jeff Chapman, Audubon Center at Debs Park, about potentially setting out some camera traps in the park hoping that some wide-ranging predators reached the park via the Arroyo Seco. He invited me during the summer and fall but I had to unexpectedly delay the camera deployment because I had to use the camera traps for surveys in Griffith Park, leaving zero to spare for Debs. I finally freed up three of my camera traps a couple weeks ago and got in touch with Jeff with perfect timing. Jeff told me that a couple of his staff members saw a bobcat. I was excited because the sightings were from credible sources; however, they were not able to capture any images of a bobcat with their own camera traps. I volunteered my camera traps and spent a few hours searching for three camera trap locations with good potential for bobcat activity. A couple obstacles that I faced were that most of the best drainages and canyons were overrun with human activity and it was my very first visit to Debs Park, which made it unfamiliar territory. Thanks to a combination of careful placement and luck, I got bobcat pictures on all three camera traps that I set up throughout the park.

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