A friend and I were sweating it up a mountain trail a couple of weeks ago, complaining about our packs, the hill and the pathetic state of our middle-aged bodies. While sweat pouring from my face produced ankle-deep mud wherever I stepped, I gasped that either of my athletic kids could do the same trip without effort.
My friend pointed out that while that might be true, it’s equally true that humans in general are complete weenies.
Compared to just about any other animal, all of us are weak, fat and slow. Being unable to win a footrace or a fistfight with an elderly Pomeranian, let alone a wild animal, I had to agree. It’s a miracle any of us survive long enough to get to the refrigerator and back.
My friend and I are confirmed nerds and our discussion of the physical virtues of the wild kingdom ranged far and wide, settling eventually on a mutual fascination with mountain lions.
The biggest cat in North America (OK, I know there are a few jaguars left down there in Mexico) is a jumping and sprinting marvel equipped with bone-crushing jaws and lightning “hand” speed.
Surely one of the pinnacles of predator evolution, cougars have just about the broadest range of any mammal that I know of. That may account for all the names they go by: mountain lion, puma, panther, painter and catamount to name a few.
Before white people showed up with guns and hounds, mountain lions could be found from about tree line in the north of North America all the way down to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America, from the Atlantic to Pacific coasts.
Aside from a few dozen holdouts in the Everglades, they’re pretty much gone from east of the Mississippi now, but you still can find them just about anywhere else where people are scarce, from grasslands to mountains, swamps, deserts, tropical rainforests and all other forest types.
Aside from the spotted coats they wear as juveniles, cougars are an all-over gray- tan that often runs to reddish in the summer like the deer around here.
Black cougars have never been documented, despite the stories.
Males average about 150 pounds, females maybe 100 or a little more … kind of like the Americans of yore.
Such great heights
The average vertical jump for a young adult human is around 2 feet. I’ve been known to clear 8 inches to reach a bag of chips on the top shelf. In his prime, Michael Jordan, aka “Air Jordan,” had an astounding standing vertical jump of about 3 feet. By comparison, the average cougar has a vertical jump of 18 feet.
Usain Bolt, maybe the fastest human sprinter on the planet, tops out at an amazing 27 miles per hour. By comparison, a cougar blasting out of cover toward startled deer or elk reaches somewhere between 40 and 45 miles per hour in about a second, in leaps spanning 30-35 horizontal feet.
Deer are pretty amazing athletes as well though, and riding one to the ground can’t be easy, even for a cougar. One study found attacks on deer were successful only about 15-20 percent of the time. Mountain lions have pretty small lungs, and if that phenomenal charge fails, they won’t give much of a chase.
On the menu …
Like a lot of extremely successful predators, cougars aren’t picky about the menu. They’re completely open to suggestion, eating pretty much whatever they can catch, which is just about anything that moves.
Over most of their range, they mostly target whatever medium-to-large prey happens to be the most common. In North America that means mostly deer and elk, but anything from moose to mice, turkeys, monkeys and grasshoppers is on their shopping list.
A study on Vancouver Island found deer made up only about a quarter of their diet, the rest filled out with stuff like raccoons, otters, and astonishingly, harbor seals and sea lions.
About 10 years ago, some trailcam pictures from over by Cle Elum showed about 10 or 12 cougars milling about with each other, which for cats, is pretty strange.
Multiplying habits
Usually, apart from reproductive obligations, cats prefer their own company and romance is a pretty brief affair. Sometime in fall, cougars look each other up. If they meet, it’s often love at first sight followed by a whirlwind romance. But after a prickly day or two, she’s sick of him already and they part ways.
The male is left to contemplate her retreating form, wondering where it all went wrong. Maybe he’s happy to be on his own again. After all, his home range is usually big enough to fit two or more female territories.
Mountain lions embody many attributes of traditional “manliness” — strength, silence, stealth, ridiculous pickup trucks, etc. But it’s perhaps this romantic uncertainty that produces the sense of kinship many of us men feel with male panthers.
Unlike wolves, foxes or coyotes, male catamounts don’t share any of the parenting duties. In fact, if he comes nosing around next spring or summer when the cubs are little, she’ll greet him with a savage assault. Somehow she knows that the male’s predatory instinct isn’t suppressed like hers and he will kill the vulnerable cubs if he can.
On instinct
That instinct to attack anything that flutters past is probably the source of stories about cougar excess or “evil gluttony” as they used to say. It’s true they will sometimes kill more animals than they can eat. Never wild prey though. By the time the deer with the short straw is on the ground, the rest of them are long gone. Deer know how to get away. Sheep or cattle, on the other hand, well …
Considering how easy domestic animals must be for a professional like the mountain lion, it’s odd they bother with wild animals at all. It must be some honor code. On the rare occasion a painter stoops to the task, no sooner has he tied on his napkin than here comes the flock running past again. Just like your house cat can’t resist a feather on a string, the big cat automatically dispatches another sheep every time the herd passes in its bleating circle.
Although mountain lions can be driven off prey by opportunistic bears or wolf packs, they pretty much occupy the top of the food chain. No animal in its right mind ever messes with a cat that can kill a moose with its bare hands. Which makes their famous secrecy hard to figure. I commuted about 45 miles a day through deer-filled habitat on the West End for 15 years and never saw one from the car.
Watch your steps
Most of the outdoors people I know count themselves very lucky to get a glimpse of one and a lot of them never have. Which brings up an interesting question. You have an extremely well-equipped killing machine with super-stealth capabilities. From a cougar’s point of view, who would be easier to dispatch? A fleet 150-pound deer with pointy feet and antlers or a lumbering human with a pack full of beef jerky snacks? If I were a cougar, I know which one I’d choose. So why do any of us ever return from a hike? Apparently, scientists think it’s because humans have an unappetizing odor that repels predators.
Just like with bears, cougar attacks on humans do occur, but considering how many people enjoy the wilderness in cougar country, attacks are vanishingly rare. In the last 125 years, only 24 humans have been killed by cougars in North America. For comparison, 20-30 humans are killed by dogs in the US each year. Really.
Consider yourself very lucky to just get a glimpse of one.
If your luck is running where you’ve recently been hit by several meteors, maybe avoid cougar country for a few days, but otherwise, don’t worry about it. If you see one up close, don’t run. You might trigger the feather-on-a-string reflex, but you’re far more likely to hit your head after tripping over your shoelaces.
Tom Butler has a degree in zoology from the University of Washington and is a lifelong student of nature. He lives in Port Angeles and can be reached at butlert@olypen.com.
