It’s the middle of a cold winter’s night when the trail camera begins to record its grainy, black-and-white video.
There’s snow falling when the spike bull elk walks into the frame with a mountain lion hanging from its neck.
Over the next 20 minutes, the female lion brings down the elk right in front of the camera. As the morning’s first light begins to spill across the scene, it becomes apparent the elk has dropped right in front of the mountain lion’s den.
Its kittens come out and begin feeding on the elk.
The clip was one of hundreds that left Missoula filmmaker Colin Ruggiero shaking his head in disbelief over the last three years as he meticulously searched through thousands of video clips gathered over a decade by hundreds of cameras strategically placed on the MPG Ranch and surrounding lands.
The cameras are part of a unique non-invasive mountain lion study headed by MPG researcher Joshua Lisbon.
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The men combined their talents to create a film called “Tracking Notes. The Secret World of Mountain Lions” that will premiere on Sunday, Feb. 27 at the Missoula’s Wilma Theater as part of the annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. People will be able to stream the 90-minute film from Feb. 28 to March 3.
“Everything about this project is homegrown,” Lisbon said. “Our study area is just south of Missoula. Colin and I live in Missoula. This is local guys telling a local story.”
Both say their film is unlike anything that people have seen before.
The motion-detection trail camera system that’s been in place on the MPG Ranch for 10 years has captured millions of video clips that offer an untrammeled view into the natural world.
There may not be anything like it in the world.
When Ruggiero first agreed to take on the project to create a 15-minute film that highlighted Lisbon’s mountain lion study, he had no idea that decision would lead him to a journey into the natural world that very few have had ever seen.
“When I looked at their archives, I discovered they had terabytes and terabytes of video that had captured these amazing moments that no had ever seen before,” Ruggiero said.
“I would go through hundreds of these clips in a row and not see a thing of interest,” he said. “It would be clips of grass blowing in the wind or a squirrel running through a frame and then on the 436th clip you find something amazing like an elk running with a mountain lion chasing it.”
“I started getting addicted to finding these little pieces and trying to connect the dots,” Ruggiero said. “Literally like a million clips and a couple of years later, I found that I could make a story out of it.”
Lisbon’s love for mountain lions started years before he found his way to tracking them at the MPG Ranch.
“I have been fascinated with them forever,” Lisbon said. “I had been tracking mountain lions for fun for at least 10 years before I came to work here. I would follow them around, try to find kill sites and then attempt to piece together all the clues.”
“Now I get paid to do that,” he said. “I feel like I’ve won the lottery.”
Unlike other mountain lion studies, MPG’s doesn’t handle mountain lions in any way.
“We’re not handling or collaring cats,” Lisbon said. “We go out tracking them in the snow but we go the opposite direction that they are going. We try to avoid interactions.”
Lisbon collects hair and scat, which is analyzed at the University of Montana’s genomics laboratory for DNA.
“Through genetics, we figure out our resident and transient populations and the relativeness of individuals,” he said. “Year by year, we track them over time to see how those families and resident populations evolve.”
That DNA information, combined long hours of field time and the video imagery from the extensive trail camera network, offers a pretty complete picture of what’s taking place on the landscape.
Lisbon initially pitched the idea of doing a short film telling the story of a female mountain that had a compelling life story captured by the trail cameras. They would later name her Willow because she was tall, thin and lanky.
“The film starts telling the story of this one female who has a unique life story,” Lisbon said. “It was a story of survival and triumph which then follows her offspring through the years.”
The film becomes much more than that.
“It became a story of the land and how all these other creatures inhabit the mountain lion’s world,” Lisbon said. “And how all those connections weave together. Sometimes beautifully. Sometimes tragically. It’s a story of the cats but it’s also the story of the land.”
Ruggiero remembers thinking there was no way that trail camera footage could be used to make a full-length film.
“I didn’t really think it would be useable because the quality isn’t great,” he said. “I thought maybe if we found some clips of exceptional behavior, then we could throw in one or two. I thought we basically would have to reshoot everything.”
That all changed when he started seeing what those trail cameras had captured.
“I changed from saying we’re not using any of that to we’re going to use mostly all of that,” Ruggiero said.
“I’ve never seen a film like I just made,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone try to make a film connecting dots between trail cam footage and that’s partly because MPG’s trail cam network is pretty much unparalleled on the planet. I don’t know of any other place that deployed a network of cameras quite like that.”
Both guarantee that people watching their film will see things that they’ve never seen captured on video before.
“I hope that it gives people an appreciation for the complexity of life out there in the mountains,” Ruggiero said. “And all the different stories that play out in all the different ways and how little we know about all of those interactions.”
For example, Ruggiero believes they captured the first footage of unrelated mountain lions feeding on an elk that died in a mud wallow.
“It was amazing footage of mountain lions feeding on an elk in the open,” he said. “We collected a lot of hair and scat and through DNA testing found they were unrelated cats.”
Ruggiero has looked hard, but he’s not been able to find any other video showing unrelated mountain lions sharing a meal.
“The science of mountain lions is evolving,” Lisbon said. “Since I been studying them, we have come to understand that mountain lions are more socially complicated creatures than we previously gave them credit for.”
Social interactions between unrelated mountain lions is something that researchers are yearning to understand.
“You get a glimpse into those interactions in this film,” Lisbon said. “There’s not a minute that goes by in this film that you’re seeing something captured on film that has never been captured on video before. Some of these interactions on a kill site with unrelated individuals just hasn’t been filmed in un-collared populations.”
“My hope for the film is that it helps people fall in love with the natural world just a little bit more,” Lisbon said. “I really hope that people can have a positive relationship with nature and that work I do can foster that.”
“If people care about the natural world then they are more likely to want to protect it,” he said. “That’s my hope.”
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