Excitement!

[Worth Mathewson]

Things got interesting around here last week. Marge was down in her tree blind for deer along the creek. She saw something coming her way that wasn't exactly the color of a deer. It certainly wasn't! It was a very large male cougar. It walked below her tree blind and she was so scared and jangled that she missed it. Of course we both wish she hadn't. This year we have seen very few deer around our place, and we think we now know the reason why. The same cat showed up on a trail camera about a mile from us two or three days before she saw it. I spoke with the fellow who had the camera and he stressed just how large it was.
We are seeing a few ducks moving into our area. Certainly not many, but at least a few. Best, Worth Mathewson

 

[RLLigman]

Same holds true here in the U.P. Our cougars are mainly males, with 35 confirmed sightings to-date over the last handful of years. The MDNR just published DNA analysis from two cougars that were killed in the last three years by poachers. Allele frequency arrays for these two cats confirmed that they were related to a cluster of cougars in northeastern Wyoming/southwestern North Dakota. I do remember a short piece in a NoDak Fish and Game magazine that tracked a pair of radio-collared cougars who had moved across the State. One was hit by a car near Fargo. The other one's collar signal died in central northern Mn.

I'll flesh this out a bit more...going out-the-door to emulate your wife's efforts with a bow. Chasing phase is on and we had a cold front roll-in last night.


Three years ago I was doing some work for a environmental non-profit. We were doing stream cross-sections and remote lake bathymetry mapping on a private forest management company's holdings. Hunter King and I were slowly working our way along a muddy woods road along that paralleled the Sucker River near Grand Marais. This is wild country. It had rained heavily that morning and the section of the river's watershed we were working in was full of beaver activity, flooding the stream channel and our road track. We stopped to survey a particularly muddy section ahead of us to determine if we could get the truck through the next 3/8s of a mile and out to a main sand road. As we walked the muddy trail margin we could see a pair of tracks in the mud that were clearly made that morning. I mentioned to Hunter that we were likely to see our first wolf sign in this area as we came up on the tracks. We both stopped and near simultaneously turned to the other to state. "These aren't wolf tracks!" These two pair of tracks had three lobes on the rear margin of the central pad, wolves, like other canids have two. We quickly realized that they were cat tracks, and that one pair was considerably smaller than the other and the stride length was much shorty. We took pictures of the tracks using a thermometer and a Garmin GPS for reference. We were quite sure the smaller cat was an young cougar, based on track size.

About a year later I received a video clip from a MDNR Forest Tech. that I fish salmon with. This was edited from several hours of video their office received showing a cougar sequentially consuming a deer. The footage was from the eastern U.P. The cat was a female...

Bucks are on the move, time to get out the door and get to my bow stand.

 

[James Woods]

Interesting. For twenty five years since I have lived in Cambridge, New York, a small town located in an agrarian area with the Adirondacks to the North and the Green Mountains to the east with vast areas of undeveloped land to the North and East, I have come across many individuals who have seen mountain lions in this area. They come from all walks of life and are most often reliable working people and farmers. But up until about three years ago, our New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) pooh-poohed these sightings-house cats or captives animals released.

Then about three years ago, a mountain lion was killed by a car on the Merrick Parkway in Connecticut. The DNA was examined and it proved to be a wild animal from North Dakota. Samples of fur and scat from the Lake George area were examined after sightings of a mountain lion earlier there, and it proved to be the same animal by DNA analyses. DEC now says there are no breeding mountain lions in New York which may be true. But the year before last from March until May we had a mountain lion hanging around the outskirts of the Village, specifically behind my house. My house borders on an organic farm of 60 acres which in turn borders upon nearby undeveloped hills and small mountains. The farm was raising free range chickens in large numbers. The farmers saw the animal, and there was a deer kill in my friends back yard in the snow with unmistakable tracks. The cat hung around for two months and both neighbors saw it in the street headed to the chicken compound. I am figuring each day or night it was picking up a six pack of free ranges without much effort.
The event was covered by the local news out of Albany, "Mountain Lion in Cambridge" and my friend was interviewed and the local police chief. I am pretty sure it can still be googled up.

In any event DEC was in denial mode again. I have a fence in the yard for our lab and I kept a close eye on her for the duration.