Family Portraits

An introduction to photographs from an anonymous friend of wildlife…

With patience and kindness, people can coexist with wildlife. With exceptional generosity and understanding, people can even befriend wildlife, as famously exemplified by Saint Francis of Asissi, Jane Goodall, and Roger Payne. A more anonymous exemplar has been living for the past two decades quietly in southern California’s Mojave Desert. The photographer and wildlife advocate who took these pictures has shared her backyard with generations of Bobcats, Coyotes, Badgers, Roadrunners, and other wild animals, who seem to know she is helping protect their homes, and bring their young to meet her. Some of the adult Bobcats and Coyotes in her neighborhood even use her as a babysitter, leaving their kittens or pups with her while they go off hunting! Intimate family portraits by this remarkable friend of the animals have inspired a ban on trapping of Bobcats in California and protection of key wildlife corridors. All the photos in this collection (and there are thousands more!) are of animals truly wild and free (‘wildeors’, to use the word for “self-willed beasts” that Dave Foreman excavated from Old English), who have learned that at least one human neighbor is willing to be a friend for life.

~ Rewilding Earth editors, August 2018