Meow!

For years now we’ve known that the world just beyond our back deck was owned by a variety of wildlife. We’ve seen coyotes and bobcats often enough to think “Good to know you guys are still there!” and of course we hear coyotes a lot more often than we see them. We’ve also known the arroyo behind our house to be in the territory of a mountain lion—a collared female had been tracked there. She, however, has proven to be much more elusive, hiding from people just like the cat she is.

In late November I bought a critter camera for my husband’s birthday, and it arrived on the slow boat from China about two weeks later. We joked that it would be really cool if we caught a mountain lion some time, ha ha ha. But we honestly had no great expectations. I mean, once you set up the camera you have to hope that it’s pointing in the right direction and that something interesting walks in front of it. Alex set up the critter camera in the afternoon of Sunday 10 December, and then we forgot about it until the next day. . .

. . . when we saw that the camera had captured both photos and videos of something, and it was a big something! It was a big cat!

Funny how even a mountain lion (Felis concolor) is still a cat. The posture and behavior is not at all different from the feline tasty morsels that live inside the house with us. We thought that someone we know should buy a new refrigerator, so we can give the big kitty a box.

Look at the size of these paws!

Note the time stamps on the photos and video. This cat was prowling around after dinner time. Of course, being mid-December-ish it was already full dark, but this is hardly the middle of the night. So the camera caught its first big animal just a few hours after it went live. Call it beginner’s luck.

A week later we caught another mountain lion! Or maybe it was the same mountain lion. This one was also uncollared and, from what we can see of the footage, has about the same build. Given that mountain lions tend to be territorial, I think this is the same cat, and this path above our beehives is a regular thoroughfare for it and other wildlife.

In a related coincidental matter, the first mountain lion was filmed using the new wildlife crossing that goes underneath Highway 17 in the Santa Cruz mountains!