The Story
Nothing can sneak up on a camera that sees in every direction, which is no help at all once a gray wolf walks over and puts its teeth on it. It is a snowy winter in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and a pack is roaming its territory with a 360 camera sitting out on the snow.
One visitor is all head. A dark wolf stands so close that the wide lens swells its skull and shrinks its legs to stilts, snow flecked across its ears, one pale eye turned on the glass. That lens flatters nobody. In life a gray wolf has relatively short, rounded ears and a large, blocky muzzle, nothing like this tapered snout. The dark coat needs no correction: in Yellowstone, gray and black wolves occur about 50:50.
For a while the camera just gets looked over. Wolves come up close enough to put a nose to it, then move on across the snow. Gray wolves are mainly nocturnal, with movements usually at night, so a wolf out on open snow in daylight is a good piece of luck.
Then the manners run out. Mouths close on the camera, snow flies across the lens, and the gnawing starts in earnest. The camera does not come out of this well.
The why is harder to pin down. Wolves are shy but very curious by nature, and pups play with bones, feathers or animal skins, 'killing' them and carrying them as trophies. Nothing here shows how old these animals are, so that stays a comparison and not an answer.
The pack has bigger business out here anyway. Across the park, Yellowstone packs average a home range of 428 square kilometers, defended by howling and urine scent marks, and elk make up over 96% of winter prey. A camera on the snow is a very small item in all that country.
