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Saturday, June 11, 2022

In today’s newsletter, we track the wild bears (and foxes) in our neighborhoods, cover a community whose homes are sinking, go high above a forest canopy … and are transfixed by bubbling lava, glowing inside a volcano.

PHOTOGRAPHS AND VIDEO BY COREY ARNOLD

By Whitney Johnson, Director of Visual and Immersive Experiences

My kids are obsessed with the fox den in our front yard.

So, inspired by Nat Geo photographer Corey Arnold and his latest feature (Why cities are going wild), I borrowed a “camera trap,” or a motion-triggered camera, from our photo engineers and got to setting it up near their den.

As I soon learned, endless variables can foil your best-laid photo plans when you leave a camera trap alone—think of theft, extreme weather conditions, the flash scaring the animal. And photographing wildlife is not an appointment-based endeavor. (Above, a bear emerging from a den under an abandoned house in South Lake Tahoe, California; below, raccoons standing at attention at night in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.)

I'd already identified a prime location for my camera trap but knowing where the fill-in-the-blank creatures will show up is critical—and can be hard to determine. For this, Corey, also a Nat Geo Explorer, had a little help from his friends.

Above, Corey testing his camera trap at a fence hole in Chicago. Below, a young coyote, who was living behind a post office in downtown Chicago, along a branch of the Chicago River.

“One of the great assets of being a Nat Geo photographer is that everyone wants to help,” Corey tells me. He posted an inquiry on Instagram: “Let me know if you have bears in your backyard.” Boom! Hundreds of responses.

Corey’s ultimate social connection was an unofficial Tahoe bear expert, who messaged that he could introduce him to bears living under local homes. This resulted in some of his most successful images.

On the story since 2019, Corey’s sense of humor—and patience—has paid off. Once “a bear unscrewed the flash from its stand,” Corey reported nonchalantly.

But when it all comes together, there is nothing more rewarding.

See Corey’s full article here. And below, my experiment with the little foxes in the yard.

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STORIES WE'RE FOLLOWING

PHOTOGRAPH BY OLIVIER GRUNEWALD

These jaw-dropping photographs show landscapes that hold secrets to Earth’s origins (above, bubbling volcanic lava in the Democratic Republic of the Congo)

Famed Vietnam War photo turns 50: ‘I am not Napalm Girl anymore’ (New York Times)

Where’s the island with a thousand orchids?

New clues on how exercise helps health, keeps diseases at bay

A stranger’s kindness saved a kid from the Nazis. That kid would confirm the Big Bang Theory.

See: Can a community survive as its homes shrink into the sinking earth? Related: One village’s battle

OVERHEARD AT NAT GEO

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREA FRAZZETTA

A sonic postcard from the Appian Way: A group called La Taricata performs an Italian folk dance in Mesagne, a coastal city along the ancient Roman highway. The dance is known as pizzica, which was said to heal women from the venom of a tarantula. Hear what it was like hiking along the Roman-era trail on the latest edition of our podcast, Overheard.

WHERE FELLINI AND 007 TREKKED

IN A FEW WORDS

QUOTE

Visually, a lot of the LGBTIQ coverage by photographers in general looks at the more visible forms of our community: Pride marches, drag shows, and gay club culture. There’s a lot of normal, everyday life that’s missing here. I’d like to see more nuanced coverage of LGBTIQ people that isn’t so sensational, outlandish, or shocking.

Photojournalist, Nat Geo Explorer

See his work documenting LGBTQ+ asylum seekers

LAST GLIMPSE

PHOTOGRAPH BY IAN TEH, @IANTEHPHOTOGRAPHY

High in the canopy: How better to be an “arbornaut”—a forest version of an astronaut—than to have a treetop view of your surroundings? Biologist and Nat Geo Explorer Meg Lowman calls this leafy view “the eighth continent” and is seeking to give people the chance to understand the Earth from this vantage point. One of her first projects was western Malaysia’s Langur Canopy Walkway (pictured above), named for a family of monkeys that munched on leaves while perching on its cables. Photographer Ian Teh got to the suspension bridge before sunrise for this view above a 130-million-year-old virgin forest. The image attracted 125,000 “likes” on our Instagram page.

HOW TO BECOME AN ARBORNAUT

This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard, Jen Tse, Heather Kim, and Monica Williams. Amanda Williams-Bryant, Rita Spinks, April George, Hobbs Bell, and Jeremy Brandt-Vorel also contributed this week. Have an idea, a wild varmint hanging around your house, a favorite forest? We’d love to hear from you at [email protected]. Thanks for reading!

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