Who shares the forest at night? Camera traps, wild boar, and the art of coexistence in Araucanía

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DseWbwkRh4

Walk through the forest of Llancalil after dark, and you are never truly alone. A culpeo fox picks its way along a stream bank. Somewhere in the undergrowth, a kodkod — one of the world's smallest and most elusive wildcats — moves silently between the trees. And crashing through the undergrowth further up the slope, a wild boar snuffles through the leaf litter in search of roots and tubers.

These animals share the same landscape. But how do they manage to do so without constantly coming into conflict?

That is the question that Myeongil Kim set out to answer during his research at the Kodkod Field Studies Center — and what he found tells us something important about what it takes to keep a forest community intact.

Sharing by scheduling

Using a network of camera traps placed across the landscape, Myeongil tracked when and where four species were active: the culpeo fox and the kodkod — both native to southern Chile — and two species introduced from elsewhere, the wild boar and the European hare.

What emerged was a picture of remarkable organisation. Rather than competing head-on, the native predators had effectively worked out a timetable with the wild boar, shifting their own activity to hours when the boar were less active. The forest, it turns out, is divided not just in space but in time — and that division is what allows such different animals to share it.

Space matters too. Each species gravitated toward its own preferred microhabitat — dense forest here, open scrubland there — not because it was being chased away by competitors, but because each animal simply feels at home in different terrain. The patchwork of habitats across a landscape like Kodkod or Llancalil is not just scenically varied; it is ecologically essential.

Where cattle change the story

The most striking finding involved livestock. In areas where cattle were present, the culpeo fox became more cautious and reduced its daytime activity — understandably wary of the disturbance that livestock and their associated human activity bring. But this caution had an unintended consequence: the fox's activity patterns ended up closely overlapping with those of the wild boar, exactly the overlap it had been managing to avoid everywhere else.

Livestock farming, in other words, was quietly dismantling the natural arrangements that had allowed these species to coexist. Without the space and freedom to set their own timetable, the native animals found themselves compressed into the same windows of time as an aggressive invasive species.

What this means for Kodkod and Llancalil

This research reinforces something we observe every day here: the health of a forest community depends on more than the number of species present. It depends on the conditions that allow those species to live alongside each other — varied habitats, corridors of undisturbed native forest, and areas where the pressure of livestock activity is kept to a minimum.

Protecting habitat heterogeneity, and ensuring that native wildlife has space to set its own rhythms undisturbed, is one of the most practical and important things we can do for biodiversity conservation in Araucanía.

The cameras keep watching. And the forest, given the right conditions, keeps finding its balance.

Find the full thesis from Myeongil in the link:

Thesis_Myeongil Kim.pdf

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