Mark Surls

Photo by Kristina McGowan

Photography shaped Mark’s life from an early age. Some of his earliest memories are of outings with his father and brother, carrying a camera bag packed with every lens his dad had generously supplied him as they slowly made their way toward a waterfall or a North Georgia mountaintop. Summer days were often spent at the Leica camera shop where his father worked, exploring the darkroom and listening to customers recount their latest photographic adventures. Evenings were just as likely to find him in his father’s furniture workshop, building previously unknown objects from scraps of wood. By adolescence, weekends were spent helping his dad at camera shows and saving what he earned to buy another antique movie camera.

After his father’s premature passing, Mark drifted away from photography. It wasn’t until he was living in rural Zambia that a camera once again became a central part of his life. For years, his attention moved between cityscapes, landscapes, and wildlife, but over the past 15 years, wildlife has become his primary focus—with coyotes and other carnivores increasingly dominating his work.

Spending countless hours in the field observing and photographing coyotes changed more than Mark’s photography. The more time he spent with them, the more he wanted to understand their behavior, ecology, and the policies that determine how they are treated by humans. Photography gradually became a doorway into wildlife advocacy.

That path ultimately led Mark to serve as a volunteer coordinator for Colorado’s 2024 ballot initiative to prohibit mountain lion hunting and bobcat hunting and trapping. Today, he serves as the Colorado & Northern Rockies Coordinator for Project Coyote, where he draws on his experience in the field to educate the public, advance coexistence, and reform outdated policies affecting coyotes and other wild carnivores. Mark still sneaks out for an early sunrise photo session and trip to a remote location as much as he can.