[pct-l] Mountain Lion Encounter

[Anthony Biegen]

Brick wrote:

> Mountain lions and cougars are solitary animals, and normally avoid
humans.
> When I was working in the woods, we assumed that all cougar sightings or
> encounters were nearly all fake.

>According to a friend on the trail:
>"Anish had a [cougar] run in at the very same spot a few nights earlier."

>So it seems we have a habituated big cat in this area.

I'm not convinced that it is habituated. I had a face to face encounter
with a mountain lion last fall while hiking with two others on a little
used trail in the Los Padres Forest near Santa Barbara. First we heard the
scream. Imagine your house cat as pissed as it can get. Now amplify that
about 100 times and drop it two or three octaves and you get the idea. The
first in our group though he saw a deer run across the trail followed by
something. We must have interrupted a hunt. While we froze on the trail
trying to determine where the sound came from, the cat jumped back on the
trail. Beautiful animal and close enough that I could see the markings on
her face. While I frantically grabbed for my iPhone to get a picture, the
first in our party started screaming and banging his poles over his head.
The cat moved on, on trail but then turned around and stared at us. Again,
picture your house cat looking our your window at something it hadn't seen
before. Moving its head side to side, up and down to get a better view.
Then off it ran before I could get a picture. Relieved, we started hiking
again toward our goal of the evening. Then Piper asked, "But where did it
go?"

We realized that we were in a narrow canyon with a high wall of a cliff on
the left and thick scrub on the right. It was a little worrisome to
continue on but we followed the cat prints on the trail for what seemed
like a mile. We heard a couple of months later that another hiker had run
into a cougar in the same location. Doing a little research I discovered
that we were in primo hunting territory for mountain lions - cliff on one
side and dense trees or scrub on the other side. Game can't escape. The cat
wasn't habituated to humans in our case; it was humans who had wandered
cluelessly through the cat's hunting ground.

I suspect that it is the same case on the PCT. A young male has found what
he thinks is a primo hunting ground and has taken it. I would think that
eventually he will realize that humans keep ruining his hunt and he will
move to a more remote hunting spot where he is the only predator.


-- 
TrailHacker