I live among mountain lions.
I share my neighborhood with them.
Did you know that mountain lions (also known as cougars) are the fouth largest cats in the world? Siberian Tigers are first, followed by African lions, then Jaguars, mountain lions are fourth, Leopards are fifth.
The fourth largest of all the cats lives just up our street. Eat your heart out, Isak Dinesen.
Even though their size makes them “big cats,” mountain lions are genetically related more closely to the house cat.
“Here kitty, kitty.”
The sad news is that the only time I’ve ever seen a mountain lion was on the side of the road.
Yes, that’s right. Someone hit and killed a mountain lion. I drove my kids to school the other day and there it was. Someone had obviously hit and killed it in the early hours of the morning.
Mountain lions are crepuscular. (I bet you think I’m smart because I know that word. I do know a few words and that is one of my favorites.) It means mountain lions are active at dawn and dusk—the times when they hunt.
They eat mostly deer, which, as a gardener, makes me very happy because even though deer are cute they are just giant hoofed rats. They harbor ticks with Lyme disease, and they eat my roses.
The only good thing about deer is they provide snacks for the beautiful mountain lions that live near me. Did you know that deer kill on average about 150 people a year?
I say snack away, Mr. Lion.
Now don’t get all worked up. Mountain lions don’t generally lie around my roses waiting for a pesky deer to graze by. They are solitary and shy and they don’t like gardens.
Or people.
Given the chance, they would avoid us all altogether.
Unfortunately we are always getting a little too close to Mr. Mountain Lion.
They don’t like to attack humans but it does happen every once in a while. Since 1991 there has been about one fatal attack on a human every year in the U.S. and Canada combined.
However, there hasn’t been a fatality due to a mountain lion attack in the area of California where my family and I live since 1909.
In 1909 an attack took place 20 miles away. That mountain lion was rabid and attacked a woman and a child. Both survived the attack but later died of rabies.
By the way, from 1909 to 1986 there were absolutely no attacks on humans
The mountain lion has the largest range of any wild land animal in the Americas, because they can adapt to almost any habitat.
They range from the Northern Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes. Sheesh, they go more places than I do.
It was very sad to see the dead mountain lion.
The puma researchers picked up the body about an hour after we saw it. They try to keep tabs on the mountain lions in the area.
It didn’t seem to have a radio collar or any tracking device on it, which means it was probably one they didn’t even know about.
Eat your heart out, Joy Adamson.
The lion died only a few hundred yards from our town’s landmark cat statues.
I hope it had a good life and enjoyed these mountains as much as I do.
The mountain lion was in the paper the next day.
Dead mountain lion found on Highway 17 near Los Gatos
By Megha SatyanarayanaA mountain lion was found dead this morning on Hwy 17 south of Cat's Restaurant outside of Los Gatos.
The large, older male was likely hit by a car sometime before 10 a.m., but it's unclear why he was on the freeway. Two people, a man and a woman, tried to drag the big cat out of the road, said Brian Cadigan, a Caltrans maintenance supervisor who responded to the scene.
The California Highway Patrol asked the three people to leave, said Cadigan, and a team from the UC Santa Cruz Puma Project took the carcass.
"It was a very unsafe situation to put themselves in," said Cadigan, who said Caltrans responds to dead animal calls on Highway 17 about every week outside of deer mating season, but this is the first mountain lion he's been tasked with.
"I've seen tracks, but I've never seen cats," he said.
The UC Santa Cruz team has been tracking and studying mountain lions in the Santa Cruz mountains. Seven mountain lions have been tagged with collars with GPS tracking devices, but it was not immediately known if the dead cat was one of the seven.
About 25 of the big cats live in this region of the Santa Cruz Mountains. About 5,000 are thought to live in California, increasingly hemmed in by subdivisions.
The odd thing about this article is that it states the lion was an older male but the picture I took shows that it clearly was a female.
Hmmmm
I know the word crepuscular, too! But I know it as those sun rays that shine out from behind clouds. Now I know another meaning for it! Thanks!
We have cats that live at our house, too. Nine of 'em. They're a little smaller than your mountain lions, although not in their minds.
Posted by: Kylee from Our Little Acre | February 02, 2010 at 04:29 PM
Chigiy,
I found your posting about your tiny tomatoes and am wondering about them.
I am posting here because it is a much more current posting, and I am hoping you will see this. Thank you for your help.
Posted by: Another Carol | February 07, 2010 at 09:08 AM