This is rather offbeat, but it does fit in with the “nature” and “puzzling things” portion of WUWT as indicated in the masthead.
These photos were emailed to me by the former Butte County Sheriff, Mick Grey, whom I have coffee with regularly. He’s had to deal with more than a few mountain lions in his career, and he’s never seen anything like this. Neither have I.
A woman who lives about 2-3 miles from Lake Oroville (about 25 miles southeast of my location) sent these pictures which were taken just 1 mile from Forbestown. A cow was found killed and the infrared trail cam (seen at left) was put in place to see what was preying on it.
[Correction: It seems both the Sheriff and I have been snookered by the person who emailed him. These photos are from Moses Coulee in central Washington. Thanks to WUWT reader Mark A. Story here:
http://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/2011/feb/18/cougar-pride-wenatchee-hunter-catches-eight-big/
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014261221_cougars18m.html
My apologies to readers, however, the photos below are legit and still worth a look.]
You can count up to eight cats in one of the pictures. Who’d ever heard of eight cougars at a kill site? They’re starting to act more like a pride of lions than the solitary cougars they normally are.
Pictures follow. Here kitty kitty.
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Oh, the Bossier City kill was about two years ago. Also, at one of the plants I worked at in East Texas, we had what I would guess at being a young male mtn lion show itself to a employee. The employee wasn’t sure what he’d seen, but after I’d questioned him thoroughly about what the critter looked like, I’m certain he did see a mountain lion. A few days later, another employees sister saw two near Marshall, TX meandering down the road.
They are repopulating old habitats. I think we’ll probably see mostly young males at first, but the females will start moving east as well. We’ve plenty of wild pig and deer to feed them too.
Just a few comments.
1. An averaged sized cow will produce around 500- 600 pounds of hamburger. That would feed many people today.
2.Just the cow at todays prices of $.60 a pound live weight is worth $720 for a 1200 pound cow.
3. Where is her calf?
4. The question. Do we want life destroying,food destroying ,people killing animals around or not? I vote for fewer cougars
I walk the same river side trails my grandmother did when she went fishing. There were cougars back then too. She carried a whistle and brought along our big as a pony old black lab with us. That old dog snacked on badgers and had shredded ears to prove it.
I have not taken my Jake with me because he would grab my fishing pole away and try to catch a fish for himself. He is also not exactly up on the rules of quiet fishing. I even have to tie him up when I’m target shooting because he thinks chasing bullets is great fun. That said, I have no doubt he would try his darndest to take on a cougar. He’s part blue healer cattle dog, part short-haired boarder collie out of a working dog family from Elgin. He is built solid as a rock and was the Alpha male pup of the litter. They had to separate the litter because he tried to get rid of the weaker ones.
By the way, I know why my .357 is heavy. That’s why I bought it. It packs a satisfying blam, blam, sits by my bed, and makes my front door hallway a pretty formidable place to be if you haven’t been invited. But you’re right. It is not exactly a quick draw gun for walking along a trail.
Here in Oregon, you can shoot a cougar without a tag if you are legally hunting for something else. And no one will come after you if you shoot one that is on your property.
If you have neither gun nor dog, when out in the woods, know the trail well, carry a high quality whistle around your neck, and turn around and look behind you every few yards. If you think you are being stalked, make a ton of noise, face the animal, throw whatever you can at it, make yourself look bigger (IE raise your arms up high, raise a big branch up high), and DO NOT RUN.
I’m still mulling over the idea of fishing with another person. That’s my me-time and I hold it jealously.
Correction: It seems both the Sheriff and I have been snookered
It’s fortunate you have a network that can catch these things. Most people don’t have that when they are in error. And being in error happens more often than we want to admit.
On January 20th, at 0700, I was headed home with the morning papers and saw motion by the roadside ahead and pulled over to let whatever it was croos the road. Expecting turkeys, I was surprised to see a cat emerge. Quickly running through pattern recognition, it was too tall for a bobcat, couldn’t be a lynx, head shape was wrong, it was a cougar. Not just a cougar though, it was the first of four to cross right in front of my pickup, ~10 yards ahead. As the forth entered the woods, I pulled up to their entrance therein, stopping to observe the last cat stop 15 feet away to look back at me. The DOW was interested as the cats don’t usually group together.
I had cougars kill a deer in a draw about 25 yards from our front door in ’09, left about 400 sq ft. of red snow, one -half of a crushed thigh bone, and a scrap of hide. Everything else was eaten on site or carried off.
We go hiking almost everyday. Have never seen a cougar while out, probably because we have a wolf for a pet and she goes with.
My brother is a member of community watch of a small satellite town near Ottawa, Canada. A few years ago they had to hire a trapper to rid them of a pack of coyotes that were preying on family pets. The final straw was a leashed lap dog that was attacked while being walked… one coyote faced down the owner while others dragged the pet away. A bloody collar was all that was found.
The trapping was successful but no one walks their animals alone any more.
We also had a similar story here in Calgary last spring
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2010/04/30/13772131-qmi.html
http://calgary.ctv.ca/gallery/html/CGY_animal_photos_100430/photo_4.html
Who’d ever heard of eight cougars at a kill site?
Well… There is this bar just down the street….
Alexander Feht says:
February 24, 2011 at 2:50 am
P.S. to commieBob:
Coyotes cannot interbreed with wolves. Coyotes and wolves have different number of chromosome pairs.
Coyotes do interbreed with wolves and dogs, genetic evidence indicates that eastern coyotes have some wolf genes.
The wolf, dingo, dog, coyote, and golden jackal diverged relatively recently, around three to four million years ago, and all have 78 chromosomes arranged in 39 pairs. This allows them to hybridize freely (barring size or behavioral constraints) and produce fertile offspring. You’re perhaps thinking of foxes which do have a different chromosome number?
http://wooferhouse.net/Links/MolecularEvolutionOfTheDogFamily/MolecularEvolutionOfTheDogFamily.htm
I was going to make a tasteless joke about older women going after young men but thought better about it and decided instead to go hunting. Anybody seen any older women on the prowl lately?
There seems to be evidence that they do interbreed. I can’t argue the evidence because that’s not my field. Here’s a link to a convincing sounding story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32976657/ns/technology_and_science-science/
Where I was raised, the coyotes really did not come anywhere near human habitation. After I moved to Ontario, I initially disbelieved stories about the Ontario coyotes because they really did not behave like the ones I was used to. The local terrain probably has a lot to do with it. In southern Ontario, even if you live in the country, you can usually throw a stone (I exaggerate slightly) and hit your neighbor. Coyotes probably have a hard time avoiding human habitation. In southwest Saskatchewan, the nearest neighbor is sometimes ten or more miles away (it’s ranch land not farming country). Human habitation makes up a very very small percentage of the total available land. The coyotes have an easy time avoiding people.
“The Beast in The Garden” by David Baron is an excellent book about cougars repopulating suburban areas. It reads like crime novel.
I have a co-worker who’s a big deer hunter. He’ll usually set up several of those automatic trail cameras on his hunting club property before season just to see where they’re likely to be moving. A year or two ago he caught some shots with at least 6 cougars that were visible in camera range. I didn’t think there were that many in Alabama, but they seem to be making a comeback.
I have seen coyotes in town pretty often. I was at a friend’s farm just after sundown last week and heard a pack of them just in the woods. Fortunately, they have a couple of Great Pyrenees dogs that keep order on the farm. 😉
Nice photos, but I don’t think this is unusual or puzzling at all. If this was the second night the carcass was out, they all knew where the food was and probably waited very close to claim the carcass. I don’t think these photos support pack activity at all, but they certainly indicate the size of the local population.
According to cougarfund.org, 2-3 cougar cubs are raised for 18-24 months and the mothers are pregnant or raising their cubs 76% of their lives. As noted in the story, we might only be looking at two related mothers and their current/recent offspring trying to pick up a free meal. Not surprising that a closely related family might all be sharing the meal and tolerant of each other’s presence.
Notice the time stamp of 4:50 p.m. Sunset at 4:01 means they got there fast or were already waiting nearby. In a period of 24-36 hours, I would bet that at LEAST two mothers/cubs could find a tasty carcass within a their hunting ranges.
A couple of weeks ago an Ocelot was phothographed in Souther Arizona for the first time.
http://azstarnet.com/news/science/environment/article_08a0d78e-3c0d-5225-b6eb-08b3b215c722.html
Not what I was hoping for with a headline of about wild photos and Cougars.
May be an excellent barometer for how much improved the environment is. We may not be aware that this type of cat normally likes group activity as there was never enough prey to support large groups in our relatively recent past?
Slightly OT but still on the subject of animal behaviour. I life in what has been called the Raccoon Capital of the World – ie Toronto. Raccoons are apparently evolving to thwart every obstacle we try to put between them and garbage, assisted by their opposable thumbs. The link here is from the Toronto Star (apologies to those familiar with the objectionable nature of this paper):
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/936548–documentary-reveals-the-secret-lives-of-toronto-s-raccoons
The documentary airs tonight.
When I was young and reading comic books (late 40s-early 50s), a coyote was something found in SW USA. I’d never heard of them in Canada until around 1970 when one was shot on Mt. Royal in the middle of Montreal. They’ve been steadily moving eastward and are now well established in the Maritime provinces (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island). Not sure about Newfoundland.
A naturalist says that they are here to stay because killing one or more just increases the size of the next litters.
Our coyotes are noticeably bigger than the SW variety. Either natural selection or interbreeding has increased their size as they moved eastward.
I have seen a couple of them in and near Saint John, and we heard a few howling one night from our then-apartment then on the western edge of the city. We had a visitor from Japan with us at the time and she was quite terrified…..
As for cougar attacks, I read of a man who was attacked by a montain lion somewhere in western Canada. He was a woodsman and carried a sheath knife with which he killed his attacker. (Our gun laws in Canada prohibit the carrying of handguns, which makes for problems like what we have read about here.)
Full marks to WUWT for carrying this story. It is about nature, and that fits in with the ambit of the site, so no excuses need be made. The many stories in the Comments were interestng to read.
IanM
Pamela Gray asks: “Are cougars attracted to anise/peanutbutter/krill scent?”
Krill? Perhaps. Above all, the scent of blood draws them. Capiche?
Ric Werme says: “I’ll transport the [bait] bag in a heavy plastic pouch. Or put it on the dog.”
Pragmatist!
Magnus says: “…CO2, in the parts per MILLION, can take down planet earth and every Living being on it. Think about that.”
Prove it.
commieBob says: “…coyotes in Ontario..come right into farm yards. They don’t act at all like the ones out west who give human habitation a wide berth.”
I saw a coyote cross the main road in downtown Ojai (CA) once. They seem to be getting way too accustomed to civilization. Yes, downtown Ojai is sort of an oxymoron, but the point is, he waited and crossed with the green light.
Well pretty cool, if you ask me. I see all these freaked out stories of cougars seen in Palo Alto; and everybody goes ape.
I don’t know why humans feel the need to walk around town with some pooch on a string as if they are chic; so if they want to go out in the wilds and troll for cougars; or coyotes for that matter, using their live bait; that’s fine by me.
I used to have a group of coyotes come and meet me at my front gate, in the morning, and make like they wanted to run in and grab my boxer. But my dog wasn’t out on the end of a dog-fishing line, so they thought better of it.
Seems like dog owners don’t have front lawns at their house; so they have to take their mutt out to do its thing on the neighbor’s front lawn. So having some cougars around would be a good thing.
Incidently, I seen reports by wildlife biologists to the effect that Cougars control their breeding to match the available food supplies. So if you put food out for animals you get more animals.
They also say, that as a result of that behavior, in order to make a dent in cougar numbers, you would have to in one season kill 1/3 of all the animals in a particular rane; so a little “culling” simply doesn’t work
Just stay out of their environment and you won’t have any problems; you can always go to the gym and do your nature walks on a treadmill just like guinea pigs do. And if you put a little rat dog in your purse and go to a bar with it, pretty soon we will have cougars, and coyotes in the bars too.
They don’t turn down two-legged prey either:
http://www.bikeforums.net/archive/index.php/t-43496.html
I do not think they are travelling in a pack just the smell of blood will draw them in for miles around. Notice in the pictures that most of them are standing back waiting thier turn on the kill, and one swatting at the other to get at the kill. Cougars are a killer but will scavenge at an opurtunity, when one is hungry anything will do.
I stay corrected regarding wolves and coyotes interbreeding.
A book that I’ve read long ago in Russia misled me into thinking that wolves and coyotes have different number of chromosomes. Perhaps, the science was “settled” differently when this book was published.