Secret life of cougars captured by Sooke man's wildlife cameras
When Paul Homer was putting up a wildlife camera on his Sooke, B.C., property years ago he captured images of a mouse.
After that, he was hooked.
Since then he’s installed 13 cameras all over his 36-acre property. He has surreptitiously captured intimate images of everything from a house cat to a huffing bear.
“We had no idea what was around us,” said the animal photographer whose finds are posted on a Facebook account called Paul’s Game Cam Pics.
Recently his camera caught two cougars pacing around the skeletal remains of a deer on one of the many cameras he has on stakes and in trees. Some point at trails or are trained at a well-travelled log bridge over a swamp.
Absentee animal paparazzi
The images they capture reveal the secret comings and goings of Sooke wildlife.
“Yeah, [it’s] a total addiction. It got bad there for a while,” said the 49-year-old fisherman-turned-school custodian.
Homer works a later shift, so gets up early to check his wildlife paparazzi cameras, sometimes daily.
Over the years his cameras have caught bears wandering the paths, countless deer browsing and even a marten on the night or “stealth cam.”
A friend suggested he point a camera at an old deer carcass — where there were clear scratches from a cougar on the ground. That turned up gold.
Homer checked the camera last week and found images of an adult mountain lion and what appears to be a cub.
‘It’s like Christmas’
The intimate portraits of the sinewy forest cats as they circle skeletal remains of a deer, have elicited hundreds of responses.
“The thing with these cameras … it’s like Christmas. You go out not expecting much … then you download. It’s very exciting. I love seeing stuff like that,” he said.
Homer and his mother bought the property that backs onto Sooke Hills back in 1995, and since then protected 25 acres of it with a covenant that only allows trail maintenance and removal of invasive species. He said that over the years he’s been amazed by how many species share his land, and awed by the size of one bear.
“I called him ‘Big Rig,’ said Homer. He’s also seen owls, deer, raccoons and even the odd rat. The animals use a bridge across the creek he and his mother use to water the garden, and the bears use a swamp to wallow in the hot summer.
“Friends joke one day they’ll run by in a Sasquatch suit,” he said.
But Homer is happy to observe the usual suspects.
“I’ve seen everything from raccoons to pine martens to owls and hawks. Just nice to know you can catch them in the wild doing their thing.”
