Ghostwalker by Leslie Patten

Author:Leslie Patten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leslie Patten
Published: 2018-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

THE ZEN OF MOUNTAIN LIONS

Pumas are such masters of invisibility that even when we researchers began to collar and collect data on them, only a little of their mystery was lost.

— HARLEY SHAW

COUNTING COUGARS

The stretch of landscape from Shoshoni to Cheyenne has about the same interest as the clickity-clack of a train on the rails, punctuated only when the lovely cottonwood-lined Platt River comes into view. Wide open desert space, much appreciated by pronghorn, transitions in slow motion from extreme desert to broken country bordering the foothills of the Laramie Mountains. This range, thirty miles west of Wyoming’s capital city, is part of the Rocky Mountains. Yet one wouldn’t know that from the rolling short-grass prairie surrounding Cheyenne at the western edge of the Great Plains. From the Wyoming border south, it’s not far to the front range of Colorado, where fourteen-thousand-foot peaks beckon.

I’m on my way to Estes Park, Colorado, a small gateway town nestled next to Rocky Mountain National Park, this year’s site for the twelfth triannual Mountain Lion Conference, attended by researchers, environmentalists, and state game managers. It’s a chance to present the latest studies and research on lions, but I’m not thinking about that during the long, eight-hour drive. As the miles roll by, I find myself pondering these large desert expanses between the high mountain ranges of the Colorado Rockies and the Laramie Range to the south, and the Bighorn Mountains and the Black Hills far to the north. Although dispersers move through, there are also resident lions making a living here on this landscape, especially those traveling discretely through badlands and arroyos, using river bottoms and coulees. And pronghorn—the swiftest resident land mammal, with the longest documented migration in North America—lives on these lands as well.

To my surprise, Toni Ruth’s Yellowstone study in the early 2000s collared a cougar that had a taste for pronghorn in Yellowstone Park. Newborn fawns, vulnerable and hidden in high grass, would be the easiest to prey on, for adult pronghorn have high-powered vision and tremendous speed. But Ruth’s pronghorn killer didn’t kill only young fawns. In fact, pregnant adults, and adults with fawns, were her specialty. Cougar predation on pronghorn is fairly rare. But in the case of Ruth’s pronghorn-killing cougar, antelope comprised a major portion of her diet, an even rarer occurrence. I wondered how a lion kills the swiftest animal in North America with precision and regularity.

The evolution of the pronghorn’s swiftness is now up for debate. For a long time, scientists maintained that the amazing speed of the pronghorn, which can run up to sixty miles per hour for long periods, coincided with the evolution of an American cheetah. Bones found in Natural Trap Cave in Wyoming—long limbed with a shortened skull—were similar to cougars, yet just different enough that researchers assumed they were related to their African cousin. But in the 1990s a more complete specimen was found in a cave in West Virginia, confirming that these cats were actually cougar relatives, not cheetahs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.