 |
| You Should Be So Lucky-- mountain lion, drawing by Beth Surdut |
©Beth Surdut 2018 CLICK for AUDIO
When someone tells me that they have seen a mountain lion in
the wild, or even that there might be one around, this frisson of excitement
sparkles through me.
Stories come to me from all sorts of people and places. My
landlord came over to work on my clogged kitchen sink. Passing by my work table, where I was
finishing a drawing of a mountain lion, he told me about being in the Rincon Mountains
ten or twelve years ago, collecting leopard frog data with friends. They were walking
by a pond, when a mountain lion jumped out of some reeds on the far side, and ran
away. Pete was the last person in line, hanging back, because he wanted to see
what was in those reeds. He waded across the pond, maybe 30 feet, thinking
there might be a kill or a den. He parted the reeds, and there was a second lion,
lying down, with its back to him. He was so close he could have touched it.
“I thought she was asleep. She turned her body and looked at
me. The hair on my arms stood up. She had beautiful eyes,” he said, and I could
hear the wonder in his voice. He backed away, slowly, and kept going. The hair
on my arms was standing up, too, and, just for a second, I was with him, and
the mountain lion, holding my breath.
“Lucky you,” I said to him “to experience that.”
“Yes, yes, I was,” he said.
So, I named the drawing “You Should Be So Lucky.”
Cougar, puma, panther, and mountain lion are common names
for the puma concolor—the largest cat
that can purr, meow, caterwaul, and yowl, but not roar. A typical adult male--6
to 8 feet from nose to tail tip-- weighs 110 to 180 pounds; females--5 to 7
feet-- 80 to 130 pounds.
Mountain lions can run up to 45 miles per hour for short
distances, leap 30 feet or more horizontally, 18 feet straight up, and 60 feet
down. They are beautiful, powerful, mysterious, and often misunderstood.
Dan Collins, retired from law enforcement in California, saw
a mountain lion in Sabino Canyon. He volunteers at Saguaro National Park West,
where he offers a presentation called Mountain
Lions: Beyond the Myth. Collins said that estimated numbers in Arizona are
2500-3,000.
With home ranges of 75 to 150 square miles--and those
numbers vary depending on which study you read--the cats are hard to count.
University of Arizona professor Melanie Culver is a
conservation geneticist who knows her scat. She has been studying mountain lion
genetics in North and South America since 1990. In a recent conversation, she
said, “There have been a lot of mountain lions in Arizona, but I don’t know
that is always going to be so. They are the last large predator that have this
very important role.” That role is that of wildlife managers. Extirpate them,
you tip the balance, creating what’s called a trophic cascade. For example,
without the presence of mountain lions and wolves, deer populations soar beyond
healthy numbers. While there have been 25 reported human deaths by mountain
lions since 1890, 1,000 people die every year in deer collisions with
automobiles.
In 1909, Ernest Thompson Seton--wildlife illustrator,
storyteller, and former animal bounty hunter turned wildlife advocate, wrote
this:
"Of all that has been written or is known of the American cougar, fully
ninety-nine percent deals with how we may hunt, pursue, murder, and destroy
this wonderful beautiful animal.”
In 1970, Arizona was the last state to stop offering bounties
for killing cougars. It is still legal to trophy hunt big cats in this state--including by hounding and trapping.
In January, 1994, on a cold clear morning—the kind that
bites your nose-- my Tucson friend Vicki Nordness and her two large dogs—a
100-pound malamute and a 75-pound Husky mutt-- walked out of her house in the
Methow Valley in the North Cascade mountain range in Washington State. They
hadn’t gone far when they heard hounds baying, their anxious voices bouncing
around the valley. The snow was so deep, that Vicki went back home to put on
her snow shoes. Starting out at 2100 feet above the valley floor, she followed
the sound up another 500 feet, where she found chaos.
Six radio-collared hunting dogs had treed something. The
pack was baying and lunging. Two hounds were fighting with each other,
wrestling and rolling down the hill towards Vicki and her dogs, who had stopped
about 100 feet away. The hounds tried to engage her dogs, so she barked at the
hounds to sit, which sent them running back to the tree.
Then, she waited.
A man and a boy appeared, with guns and no snow shoes. They
post-holed slowly through the deep snow, their legs disappearing with each
step. Vicki, 40 years old, slight of build and strong of spirit, guessed the
man to be about her age, the boy about eighteen.
After introducing herself, Vicki told them, “Whatever you
have in that tree, I don’t want you to kill it. Is it a cougar?”
The man said, “I hope so. We’ve been chasing a cougar and
her young all morning on our snowmobiles.”
Vicki asked, “Couldn’t you just take a picture?”
The boy said, “I want to stuff it and put in my living room.
I’ve been waiting 5 years to get this permit. Let’s just respect our
differences.”
An older man, walking more slowly than the others,
approached them. He was the grandfather.
“What’s this worth to you guys?’ Vicki asked.
“What do you mean?” said the father.
“I’ll pay you not to kill it. How about 500 dollars?”
The grandfather said, “Okay, okay, we’ll just take
pictures,” and he took out a little movie camera.
They all walked up to the Ponderosa pine where the hounds
had been baying the whole time.
There was the cougar, about 15 feet off the ground.
As the men finally walked away, Vicki realized that she
could walk up the slope to be 15 feet away from the tree and at eye level with
the cougar.
One of the men turned and yelled that she wasn’t safe unless
her dogs were baying.
Her dogs never looked at the cat; they focused on the men.
So there she sat, with the cougar, in the beautiful silence
of the Ponderosa pine forest, her dogs by her side.
She returned the next morning and found the cougar’s tracks
where it had walked away from the tree, from the hounds, from the men with
guns, and from my friend, who told me that seeing a cougar in the wild, was the
thrill of a lifetime.
For more Art of Paying Attention from the NPR series, visit my Critters page Paying Attention to Nature
Posts
