Filming Montana’s Stealthiest Predator: the Mountain Lion

CORRECTION: Colin Ruggiero’s name was likely mentioned more times in a single Mountain Journal article than has any other name in the publication’s history. The spelling of his last name has been corrected. Mountain Journal regrets the error.

Videographer Colin Ruggiero struggled to change his camera batteries as fast as he could, but rain kept dripping off his headlamp and his cold, wet hands weren’t responding well. They also might have been trembling a bit, because he knew the mountain lions were close — he could hear them padding around in the dark.

“I have [footage] where you can see my feet leave the frame, and before it stops recording 60 seconds later, there’s a mountain lion in the frame. They’re just watching me from like 30 yards away in the willows, and as soon as I walk off, they walk out and start eating,” Ruggiero said. “I told myself they have a whole elk here, they don’t need to mess with me.”

Ruggiero, a wildlife filmmaker, was using camera traps to record a family of mountain lions feeding for several days on an elk carcass stuck in a mud wallow. That was where the main action was in the fall of 2019, but his cinema cameras were just a few of the hundreds of motion-sensing cameras that have been recording for years across the MPG Ranch in the Sapphire Mountains south of Missoula, Montana. As a result, MPG has thousands of hours of footage of a wide variety of animal species and their behavior. Few people, however, have seen the footage. Until now.

A select number of clips ultimately became the PBS Nature documentary, Willow: Diary of a Mountain Lion, which debuted Oct. 29. The episode follows a cougar named Willow from when she was a cub through several seasons when she had cubs of her own. The 52-minute film is a tidy package, what you might expect from PBS Nature, but it didn’t start out that way.

Joshua Lisbon launched the MPG Ranch Mountain Lion Research Project in December 2012, tracking lions in the winter and positioning trailcams in strategic locations. Reviewing the camera footage, he noticed a few individuals reappeared year after year. The researchers were also collecting hair samples for DNA, so he was able to confirm they were the same animals. One subject was Willow, a female mountain lion that Lisbon first spotted in the footage as a cub in 2013. 

“Every winter, we were slowly building this story and we’re realizing she’s leading this remarkable life. And we’re documenting it very well along the way,” Lisbon said. “Then, after having compiled all this, one of the questions is, ‘How remarkable is this life? Or is it just that we were able to document it?”

With Willow in mind, Lisbon reached out to Ruggiero about compiling a short video, maybe 20 minutes long, about the lion project. Once Ruggiero gained access to all of MPG’s trailcam footage, he got sucked in, methodically viewing thousands of hours of film. Like Lisbon, he found some animals had “throughlines” that made him think the footage could be something bigger than a promotional piece. 

“Normally, a random clip recorded in the woods somewhere is not something you can use to tell a story,” Ruggiero said. “There’s no continuity; there’s no before or after. And there were so many of them. But I was just like ‘I want to make an hour-long film’ and then I was like ‘I want to make it an hour-and-a-half.’ So I just kind of made it on my own.”

Ruggiero released that feature-length film as Tracking Notes: The Secret World of Mountain Lions in time for several documentary film festivals in 2022, including Missoula’s International Wildlife Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award. Bolstered by those accolades, Ruggiero pitched the film to PBS Nature.

“I knew one of their commissioners from the film festival circuit, so I showed her this film that I’d made. It was quite a long shot. It’s not the kind of film that would be a good candidate for commercial broadcast and television — it’s relatively low-quality trailcam footage,” Ruggiero said. “But she thought, ‘Oh, this might be a good fit for Nature.’” 

The original documentary was too long but selecting which 38 minutes to cut wasn’t easy. But PBS Nature allowed Ruggiero to make the edits, and he was able to lose mostly peripheral natural history tidbits. He’s happy with the final product. And so are the PBS Nature viewers, which have left glowing comments on the PBS Nature YouTube page and on other social media.

“The film has actually been getting some crazy attention, and this Willow character has been going viral … [The documentary has received] thousands of comments from people like ‘We love Willow’ and ‘Willow forever.’ I like the attention, but I kind of hate anthropomorphizing,” Ruggiero said. “A lot of people keyed in on this ‘single mom’ and made her this heroine, a little to my chagrin. But whatever it takes to get people interested.”

All female mountain lions raise cubs on their own, but Willow was an especially good mother. One year, the cameras revealed she was caring for six cubs, which is highly unusual, especially because she safeguarded them all the way to adulthood. At the time, Lisbon didn’t know if Willow birthed them all, but much like the public’s excitement over Grizzly 399 producing four bear cubs in 2020, the PBS audience is impressed with Willow’s mothering prowess. 

That isn’t the only unique footage in the documentary that blows apart some old assumptions about big cats, showing how much we have yet to learn about the natural world and wild cats in particular. With the invention and improvement of trail cameras, so much more is being revealed.

As MPG researcher Maggie Hirschauer says in the film, “It’s not the same as being there, but it lets you witness things you could never otherwise see.” For example, one segment shows unrelated lions sharing a carcass, a behavior uncharacteristic of such “territorial” animals. Researcher Mark Elbroch has written about similar interactions, according to Lisbon, but this is the public’s first view of it.

“[People] make a lot of assumptions,” Lisbon said. “There’s a lot that we don’t know, and we fill in those gaps with what we believe to be. We then discover upon observation that a lot of our assumptions are incorrect. That happened with this study.” 

Jim Williams, former Fish, Wildlife and Parks lion biologist, says Ruggiero was masterful in selecting key footage from remote cameras, which have come a long way from the 35mm automatic film cameras that FWP grizzly biologist Tim Manley started rigging up in the late 1980s.

“In Patagonia, you watch these same behaviors with your own eyes and in daylight, but not up here,” Williams said. “It’s just so fun to watch how he tied the video clips to a story narrative on a conservation ranch. My favorite clips, however, were watching the female puma simply walking in a snowstorm at night.”

Neither Ruggiero nor Lisbon are finished with their mountain lion videos, however. In the film, they left Willow’s story in winter 2022 when, for the first time, she didn’t return to her den sites. It’s chilling, because the film mentions that hunters kill several lions every year on public land around the ranch.

But Lisbon said they kept filming until he left MPG in June 2024, and he thinks he knows what happened to Willow and how she came to have six kittens. Now, he and Ruggiero want to make a sequel with the additional footage. Ruggiero says it’s a little tougher to follow certain cats now that he no longer has access to the ranch itself. But he has camera traps set up in the Sapphire Mountains around the property.

“In a lot of ways, this film was kind of a one-off. But believe it or not, I think I have enough footage to make a follow-up that is as crazy as the first one. Stuff that’s never been filmed before,” Ruggiero said. “Sequels are not really something that Nature does. I mentioned it right off the bat and they said no. But they don’t know what I have.” 

Visit pbs.org to stream “Willow: Diary of a Mountain Lion” through November 26.