Our neighborhood Mountain Lion is back. This photo was taken today by a lady a few houses away from me on my street. She found it on her driveway. please log in to view this image
You can kill them if you have the right hunting license. Two years ago they made it illegal to hunt them with dogs which is basically the only way one can kill them without getting blind lucky as in you are out hunting deer and hey a mountain lion walks by. They have really massive territories so after it leaves it probably wont be back for a few months unless it is a female and has kittens which one did on my street last year. It could be a young male as when the leave their mothers around this time of year they go off and find their own territory and that trek is how most of them are seen by the public. I think the news said last year that they think there are around 5,000 of them in California.
It depends on where you are from. They have lots of names, Mountain Lion, Lion, Puma, Cougar, and Catamount. Its regional depending on what you call it there could be more names than that but those are the ones I can think of right now.
Na my neighbors feed it their dogs. Its killed Rottweilers, Pit Bulls, German Shepherds all kinds of dogs on my street. Most people are smart enough to lock up their goats and such at night but there is always some idiot who thinks his big dog can survive out here at night. Personally I try to avoid participating in that nonsense so my dog stays in at night. Although a hawk could kill my dog, its like the size of a squirrel. People do have them as pets, you have to have a special permit and facilities. I think that you have to get one from an animal rescue I dont think you can take one from the wild.
Damn it Kellen....you scared the hell out of me. I saw the title of the thread and thought it had just happened. Then realised it was last July. Anyhow relieved that you and your property/animals came through ok. Take care mate and if you ever do need help we're not too far away!!
Judging by the size of that paw print that's a big animal and I wouldn't want to meet up with it. It's interesting because recently, we have coyotes intruding into our towns and cities and there have been confrontations with them and people walking. Also, over the last few years we seem to have been overrun with squirrels. I never saw them for the first twenty or thirty years I lived here and now they're everywhere including squashed on the road every day. I guess someone should teach them to look left, look right and left again before crossing (I guess it would be look right, left and right for you guys and then "quick march") as they taught me at Cunny infants.
At my junior school( Flinton Grove - now called Foredyke Primary) we sang a song called 'The Kings Highway" which called for safety and looking right then left then right again. It was sung at the end of every term in morning assembly and I provided the piano accompaniment.
I heard it last year in the morning, if you have ever heard one it sounds like a woman screaming. It was just in the bushes behind my chicken coop and my neighbors 3 dogs chased it a little distance before it screamed and the dogs took off the other way. I heard it jog away after but I never caught site of it even though it was probably only 50 feet or so away from me. That mountain lion was a female and it had 2 kittens. Someone saw this one or another one a couple days ago on my street and said they thought it was a juvenile and about 100 pounds. So this print is either the mother or probably a wandering male, unless a full grown print is far larger than this. This is basically the sound but its not pissed just looking for a mate. When its pissed its incredibly loud. We have coyotes on my street as well but they are not really numerous. My guess is the mountain lions and the bobcats kills them (I have seen 2 bobcats on my place this year). We have female bear to but I don't think it would probably go after a coyote.
We get a lot of foxes, specially now hunting's banned. They really should overturn the hunting ban, foxes are dangerous beasts. And they don't half damage your car when you whack em.
There used to be a few foxes in our parks but I haven't seen one since the coyotes arrived on the scene. This has also coincided with a drop in the number of jack rabbits (hares) one sees. I guess the coyotes should learn to climb trees and deal with the bloody squirrels.
It's like a pheasant assault course on the road outside my place at the moment, there's hundreds of them.
