Caturday: An Amorous Mountain Lion Pair

Last week, I told you about the mother mountain lion and her two kittens who were in our area. I haven't seen them recently but a new saga started after they departed.

It began with this photo. I am focusing my trail cams on our remaining water sources now because so many natural springs and water holes are dry. This lion stopped for a drink. By itself, that's not unexpected.

Then, there was another drink by a lion. I didn't know if it was the same one or a new one.

When this third bit of footage appeared, I was thinking that a lion had a carcass stashed near this spring and was stopping for a drink on his way to and fro the carcass.

Then came one of the most surprising mountain lion images of a lion that I've seen in a long time. Look closely at the upper left corner. Yes, that's the nose of another mountain lion who was licking the drinking lion's fur.

I believe that the left mountain lion is a male and the one who is drinking is a female. The male repeatedly licked the fur of the female.

Then he got more forward and tried putting a paw on her back. The female growled - by far the lowest and most scary sound I've ever heard from a mountain lion.

Obviously not as impressed as I was by the growl, the male kept licking her fur and making small overtures as the female drank.

Then, the female growled again for good measure just before she got up to trot away. The male was on her heels.

This is almost certainly a mating pair of mountain lions. The above black and white photos were from the only footage of them together but each of them came to the spring in the days before and after they were together.

Here's one lion at the spring, the male I think. He'd drink and then crane his neck to look over his shoulder. I suspect that the female was somewhere back there. He is distinctive-looking with his whitish chest.

This pattern was still going on when I last checked the camera at the spring. A mating pair will spend at least a week together, if not longer. If the female is impregnated, she'll give birth in about three months - in October.

I have footage of this amorous mountain lion pair. I made two versions of it. The first is very short - it shows only the time when the two were together at the spring in front of my trail camera. The second is a bit longer, including snippets of the visits of the cats to the spring around the time when the pair was together on camera.

The short video:

And the longer version:

My trail cameras are incredibly time consuming but the amazing footage that they get makes the effort very worthwhile.

The Runner thought of quite a few one-line jokes to go with this footage. Can you think of any?

The Magic Carnivore Tree - Bobcat, Coyote, Fox, and Lion All Visit

Some of you may remember the big pine tree where mountain lions have marked repeatedly this winter.

You might remember this guy kicking off the marking season back in November.

Since then, the mountain lions have paraded to this spot. Each male has left his own mark in almost the same place as all the other lions.

Other carnivore species have visited as well. Here is a bobcat, small in stature but large in spirit.

As he departed the spot, he looked regally in the direction of the camera.

The next visitor was a coyote who brazenly urinated directly over the lions' scent.

The coyote was very wary, fleeing toward the cover of the forest a couple of times (as you'll see in the video). Here, he stood still to listen for danger. I bet that he smelled the recent markings left by lions who could easily kill him.

Finally, one of the kings of our forest visited just a couple of nights ago. He marked in almost the identical spot as the first lion back in November!

My trail cameras record video, which I put together into a single video of the visits of all of these animals. You can watch it here or over at Youtube.

Happy Wildlife Monday!

Bold Lions out in Daylight

Mountain lions are cruising our forest frequently and boldly. Unlike usual, they've even been nearby during the day.

At a mountain lion marking site where big males have left deep scrapes in the ground, a young mountain lion stopped to sniff. First, she sniffed the ground.

Then, she sniffed the air. Soon, she was back to air scenting with her long lithe neck craned to get her nose as high as possible. The wind was wildly whooshing out of the west, and she clearly smelled something. In fact, it might have been Shyla and me. We were generally upwind of her at about that time.

Then, she bore a hole in the camera with a stare.

Two things make me think that she's young and a female. First, you can faintly see her kitten spots under her fur. They are more obvious in the video. As for being a female, I am basing that on the fact that she did not mark this spot. I think that a male would have.

It was so cool to watch her bound away in a kittenish way. I have *never* seen an adult mountain lion do anything but a lumbering walk.

Just two days later, a mature male mountain lion showed up at the old elk carcass from almost a month ago. Look at the size of his paws!

He meticulously sniffed every detail on the ground, and then he sniffed the carcass.

I'm betting that his cat has a kill nearby. He headed further downhill with a purposeful gait when he departed. Moreover, look at that full stomach hanging downward.

I think that he's a male because he left two marking scrapes out of view of the camera. Usually, males mark and females don't. Also, his bulk makes me think that he's a male.

I made a video of the visits of these two mountain lions to my camera sites which you can watch here or at Youtube. If for no other reason. watch it to see the young mountain lion bound away. It was amazing to see!

Happy Wildlife Monday!

A Bear Selfie!

I love it when animals interact with my trail cameras, even though it sometimes results in severe damage to the camera!

A black bear passing through our neck of the woods (not a long term resident bear) was examining a bear marking area when he noticed my camera. When watching the video, be sure that your audio is on so that you can hear him breathing and panting.

He seemed to look for food near the camera, and then he noticed the camera. He sniffed it, showed it his teeth, and then gave it a look. We got a closeup of his face and then his eye in the process!

After that, he headed over to the marking tree and left his "I was here" message.

It's just a simple little observation of a black bear living his life - but I love it!

You can watch the short video either here or at Youtube. I've made a pact with myself not to let any fun wildlife videos languish in my archives this year (unlike previous years). I hope that you enjoy them like I do!

I adore our bears. Their quirky personalities make me laugh regularly!

Tiny the Black Bear Survives a Stick Impaled in his Leg

Back in mid-May, I saw something disturbing on my trail cams. Tiny, one of our biggest male black bears, had a stick impaled in his hind leg. Look closely at his right hind leg/rump.

Then, two days later, he walked past with the stick gone but an obvious open wound.

At first, my footage of him showed no limp and plenty of energy. However, by 3 weeks later, he looked terrible. He'd clearly licked the area extensively and the fur there was very thin. He had a painstaking limp, and he was not marking trees that he'd normally mark dramatically.

I was worried. My guess was that he had an infection. I wished that I could somehow give him an antibiotic. I laughed at myself for even thinking such a thing.

Then, he disappeared for a full 8 days. That is extremely rare during mating season. I worried even more.

Then, to my utter delight, I found footage of him on a couple of cams. I could still see some evidence of thin fur on his hind end but it was already much better. It's molting season too which probably helped that to improve quickly. Plus, he was walking nearly normally, and he was marking trees again!

I made a video of the various stages of his saga. At the end, he was walking "normally". By that, I mean that he was walking like a bear near marking trees in mating season. He was using a gait sometimes called a "cowboy walk". It's a way of grinding his paws deep into the dirt to leave maximum scent from his paw pads.

Near the marking trees, there are bear tracks which are impressions of exactly where every mature bear who passes that spot places his/her paws. It's extremely hard to see or photograph but it's easy to feel. For a bear as big as Tiny, he has to shorten his stride to hit the right spots. Plus, he swings his hind legs out to the sides as he walks when he's in these tracks - the "cowboy walk".

After all that technical stuff, the main thing is how relieved I am that Tiny is okay. We have two main male bears in our neck of the woods, and they've ruled for about a decade, as far as I can tell. I'm glad that this spring was not the time that we lost one of them.

Here's the video.

I'm a very happy bear observer today!

The Last Bear of 2016!

Our last bear wandered the paths in our forest in early December. Now, he's gone to bed just like all his brethren.

I have footage of his last days of wandering. It's remarkable how slowly he was moving as his metabolism wound slowly down toward hibernation.

Early on 12/3, he started walking on bear trails, albeit very slowly. I first picked up his image at a bear-marking tree. He sniffed it...

... and sniffed it some more.

Before leaving, he showed us the snow matted in his rump. I think he'd been sitting someplace for a while before he walked to this tree.

Just a little later, I found his tracks. On this remote road, he loped along the left edge, I rode my snow bike in the middle, and a rabbit hopped along the right of the road. We all left our tracks.

I captured video footage of this bear at several sites over the next 36 hours. He visited several bear-marking trees and then came to my house! That made me laugh after I'd had fun tracking him the previous day.

We have a bear-proof bird feeder that the local bears all know is truly bear-proof and rarely visit. I don't think that this bear was a local bear so he spent a long time on his hind paws staring up at the food over his head. His slow pre-hibernation behavior was markedly different from the behavior of the only other bear who visited back in May.

I hope that you enjoy the video!

More Mountain Lion Action

Yesterday was devoted mostly to trying to keep our black dog calm and not-too-unhappy. I can't blame him for feeling upset. He just went through this same thing so very recently. What he doesn't know is that this episode should be much shorter - assuming that the pathology reports are not bad.

In the meantime, I spent some time sorting through the 200 GB of footage that I have so far of animals eating the elk carcass. For today, I'll share mountain lion footage. No other mammals, like coyotes, dared to go near the carcass while the mountain lion was still interested in it.

In the video, you'll first see one of our favorite dog friends check out the carcass and try to eat a little of it before sprinting back to his human. Then, you'll see the mountain lion arrive for his second night of eating. The contrast between the Lab's size and the mountain lion's size is stunning to me.

The mountain lion was always very wary while at the carcass. He'd stop eating to scan his surroundings regularly. I'm not sure if he'd be so wary if he weren't close to humans. He did one bout of eating from nightfall until 7PM. Then he returned at 4AM and ate for an hour. I wonder if his umbilical hernia limits how much he can eat in one bout because it must hurt if his intestines get full.

His strength awes me. When he first arrived both times, it looked as if he tried to move the elk but couldn't pull it uphill. If it were a smaller prey item or if a secluded spot were downhill, I'm sure that the lion would have opted to move the carcass to a safer spot.

Finally, when he departed at 5AM, he covered the carcass with snow, using his mammoth paws to throw snow backward onto the carcass.

Enjoy the peek into a mountain lion's life in the video.

A Mountain Lion Kill

The other morning, my friend called to tell me that there was a dead elk on her land. She'd seen the carcass as she drove out for the day and asked if I'd go take a look to see if I could tell what had killed the elk.

I went to have a look. I saw the carcass almost right away based on her description of the location, and I stopped to scan the world around it to see if any predators were around. I didn't see anything scary so I went closer.

It was a cow elk. It was partially covered by snow and debris but the body was completely intact. It was obvious to me that the covering was intentional. Based on that clue, I immediately was sure that a mountain lion had killed her. Then I saw the mountain lion tracks in the snow, confirming my conclusion. It was a fast and precise kill, probably a severed spinal cord, that left no blood in the snow.

I took a few steps backward and again scanned the world around me. Was the mountain lion watching me? Was he nearby? Was he up high in the trees that were next to me? I couldn't see him but I imagined that I could feel his eyes boring into my back.

Seeing no danger, I turned back to the carcass, and my heart broke for the cow elk and her calf. I could see that she was lactating and her calf had been nursing up until the time of her death. I wanted to cry for that calf who surely wasn't too far away and for the mother who surely didn't want to leave her calf behind.

I pushed those thoughts aside so that I could work quickly. I had come prepared with trail cameras to document the predators or scavengers who would consume the carcass. It comforts me to some extent to know that other animals will flourish due to this windfall of calories and nutrition. I quickly set up the cameras, and I departed.

I picked up the memory cards from the cameras yesterday at midday. They told me that the mountain lion who killed the elk arrived a couple of hours after I set up the cameras. I was astounded to see from the trail camera photos that he arrived in daylight because this was a spot very close to a road and houses.

He was very wary, constantly scanning the world around him.

In between his nervous scanning, he started to work on the carcass. First he removed a lot of fur. Then, he had to break through the outer body wall. That takes great strength that you can almost sense in the next photo.

He stopped to scan again. When I saw this photo, I realized that I know this cat. He's been traveling through our area for at least a year. He has a distinctive abdominal bulge that you can see in this photo. I'm not sure what it is - but I do know that he seems as strong and as healthy as ever so it isn't preventing him from hunting and thriving.

This photo gives you a good sense of the relative sizes of the lion and the elk. The elk was at least twice as big as the lion, yet the lion took her down seemingly with ease.

This photo shows you how close to people he was. Do you see the vehicle behind him?

He took a break from eating after a while, and he stopped to pose for my camera briefly as he left to rest.

I also have a camera recording video, and I'll share that video very soon. I think that he'll be working on this carcass for a while if nothing goes awry.

I feel privileged to be able to see this secret life of our forest's fiercest predator. I promise that I'll share more of this episode in future posts.

Mountain Lions on the Prowl Again

Cougars have been moving silently through our forests over the past few weeks. It's interesting timing because I'm finding myself out in the forest in the dark more often than ever. I wear a headlamp and scan for glowing eyes all the time. Yet, I'm not really scared - I'm just taking ordinary precautions. I'm glad that something bigger and fiercer than me is out in the forest. It changes the prevalent feeling that humans rule the world because I certainly don't even rule the forest around my house. And, I like it that way.

I am not certain if our feline activity is from one or two mountain lions. At least one of them looks young to me. He still has faint bars on the inside of his front legs, suggesting that he's a young adult. I'm not certain if he's still loosely traveling with his mother or not.

In the video below, you'll see a transition in scene about 38 seconds into the video. There was a mountain lion captured by one camera at 4:51 PM, and then another lion captured by a cam at least a half mile away 5 minutes later. That was a very fast walk for a mountain lion. They usually saunter along, at a fairly slow pace (2 mph or so), as you can see from watching them walk. That timing was what made me feel more strongly that it might be two mountain lions rather than one.

In any case, it is very exciting to have mountain lions so active in our neck of the woods again. After almost a year's hiatus, the forests are alive with our biggest predator once again!

The video is very short (a minute or so) but it lets us see an unprecedented (for me) amount of video of these animals moving naturally around their territory.

I am wondering if the mountain lion(s) in the video might be this mother lion with her kitten. Last winter, almost all the lions in our area had their GPS collars removed, which would explain why she had a collar last summer but not now. I know from the GPS study that this female tended to make big moves from one side of a canyon to another once or twice per year, living on one side of the canyon without crossing it for up to a year. If one of her kittens is still with her after spending a year on the other side of the canyon, he'd be almost a full adult, which would fit with what we're seeing in the video.

I know it may be a pipedream but I am hoping that this mother mountain lion has returned to our neck of the woods to finish raising her kitten and perhaps to give birth to a new litter! Do you see the spotted kitten just in front of her?

As I said in a recent post, our country is unique in the vast open spaces that we've preserved and in our acceptance of some predators living among us. Now, it's time for those of us who value the wildness of our amazing country to step up and help preserve our environment. Let's keep some of our country open and wild so that large predators can continue to flourish.

Bobcat Family

You may remember that I followed a mother and her two bobcat kittens last summer. You can see the posts here, here, here, and here.

Usually, I see mother bobcats with their kittens for the last time sometime around February. It turned out that the mother bobcat and her two kittens were in front of my trail camera in late January!

Mom arrived.

She sniffed a bone that has laid in front of this camera for ages and always attracts the attention of bobcats. As she sniffed, one kitten arrived.

Mom and her kitten sniffed together. If you look to the left of them, you can see the other kitten approaching from the snowy background.

As soon as the other kitten arrived, mom walked away. You can see her on an animal path in the background.

The first kitten quickly followed while the lagging kitten lay down in front of the camera.

The lagging kitten rolled around and showed us his white spotted chest and belly. It's moments like this one that only trail cameras can capture. Most of us would never see such a sight with our own eyes.

After this fun photo, the kitten sprinted after his family, and I'm sure he caught up. By now, these kittens are at least 7 months old, and they will soon strike out on their own. For now, they travel "loosely" with their mother, meaning that they are usually in the same area as her but not necessarily right next to her.

In fact, in the days after the family visit, that same trail camera repeated photographed single bobcats, likely members of this family, who passed it by themselves. This is part of the pattern of the kittens gradually becoming more independent.

Getting trail camera photos of our wildlife really helps me through February which always feels like the longest month even though it's actually the shortest! I wish that we would get photos of the mother mountain lion and her two kittens who we followed last summer (posts are here and here). I suspect that they made a "big move" for the winter to an entirely different area. If they were still near here, I would probably know it. However, I do have a "snowed in" trail camera that I probably won't check until the big spring melt. Then, we'll know for sure if they've been in this area for the winter or not.

In the meantime, I'll dream of the next time I can pick up memory cards from our "den cams" that are monitoring the black bear in her den. I am so curious to find out there are noisy new cubs in the den with her. They would've been born in the second half of January!

To keep February happy, I'll keep playing with the ever-joyful Shyla!

If only I had Shyla's athletic capabilities, I'd be able to frolic in the snow in February, and then I'm sure it would seem too short to me!!

I hope that all of you are enjoying your Saturdays.

Snowstorm and a Mountain Lion

So far, our snow storm hasn't lived up to the billing. It's snowed hard at times but it looks to me like we have only 6-8" of new snow. However, our local forecaster says that it will keep snowing overnight and through tomorrow.

Shyla and I had a snow bike outing this morning, in the midst of the falling flakes.

In areas where the snow has built up without melting all winter long, the depth is impressive.

Before big snow storms, the wildlife starts moving to get to places where they'll have food to eat. In the case of the deer and elk, that usually involves moving to lower elevations where the snow will be less deep. The elk herd, in particular, usually passes by our neck of the woods on their way downhill.

As the elk move, their predators set up to try to ambush them. Thus, I wasn't terribly surprised to see that a mountain lion was near our house this weekend.

This mountain lion visited a huge old Douglas fir that has a thick layer of pine needles under it. It is a common place for carnivores to mark as they pass through.

Like many before him, this lion marked, kicking backward with each huge hind paw and then urinating in the scrape he'd made.

A couple of bones linger in this clearing. Mountain lions have killed many deer and elk near here. The lion sniffed the bones.

Then, he noticed the soft red glow coming from my trail camera. He stared at it as he licked his lips.

He made a funny face as he pulled in his tongue.

He looked to his left, giving us a nice view of his heavily muscled body.

And then he departed.

We've had very few mountain lions come through our neck of the woods recently so this series of photos made me smile!!!

The "mountain lion clearing" looks very different now, buried under our new snow!