![]() ![]() Legal protections have helped mountain lion, black bear and bobcat populations slowly rise over the last few decades. ![]() He tries to communicate the real value of wildlife to ranchers, while recognizing the need to keep their livestock safe.įinding solutions for predator deterrence is only going to become more necessary. In the American west’s long history of hunting and trapping, Chrysafis’s approach is a softer one. The best audio for perturbing predators is lengthy, animated and includes multiple voices, so sometimes Chrysafis records his own Dungeons & Dragons sessions and plays them out hour after hour through solar-powered radios, like a digital St Francis preaching to the animals. One effective predator-repellent is human smell: Chrysafis hangs detergent packets in trees, or wrings the sweat out of his own shirt. The tools he uses to keep up this grand illusion have the unsophisticated charm of Home Alone booby traps: radios playing a constant murmur of voices, flickering motion lights that mimic a human with a flashlight, “Critter Gitters” that emit startling high-pitched sounds.Ī cow skull attracts the attention of a coyote on the Carrizo Plain in California. Element by element, he builds up an elaborate theater of human presence. Many of Chrysafis’s deterrence techniques are designed to simulate human activity. A trusty guardian llama can run off coyotes, but might become lunch for a mountain lion. ![]() Flashing lights usually scare off mountain lions and bobcats, but coyotes quickly get used to them. Once the culprit is identified, Chrysafis sets out a plan to deter them from going after livestock again. “It helps people like the wildlife that they live with.” “It does change people’s perception of things,” Chrysafis said. The images he gathers often help to put landowners at ease caught on film, even a mountain lion can seem less like an unseen stalker and more like an introverted neighbor. The cameras are motion-activated, and store a few thousand time-stamped photos – shots of wildlife slipping by, sniffing the air and glowing like ghosts in night vision captures. He walks the land, looking at it say, how a mountain lion might see it – the vantage point of a high ridgeline, the draw of a pond – and places cameras by the clearings and trails where animals are most likely to walk by. To gather information, Chrysafis deploys his secret weapon: trail cameras. His process begins with identifying the local predator. “This work is 90% human conflict, 10% wildlife conflict.” “There’s anger and then there’s grief that you have to navigate,” he said. When he arrives at a farm where owners have just lost livestock, emotions often run high. He works on about 60 cases a year in California’s backcountry settlements, grazing lands and mountain communities. “No point carrying bear spray,” Chrysafis said. Today, he treks out into predator country without fear. His goal is to offer an alternative: coexistence.Ĭhrysafis, age 33, grew up in the Republic of Cyprus, where the largest beast of prey is a red fox. Typically when he first meets his clients, they are ready to find and kill the predator that’s been attacking their livestock. His job is an odd combo of forensic scientist, homicide detective, set designer and negotiator. ![]()
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