Never a Cougar

The cougar fastened its mouth on Sederbaum's head, crunching down and shaking him side to side like prey, King County Sheriff's Sgt. Sederbaum managed to get loose when the cougar started chasing Brooks, who was running away, Abbott said. How to win the fight of your life. That's what you never do," Corwin said. That's the fight response for the cougar. You stand your ground, you hold your ground. You never turn away from the cougar. You look at it face to face, look larger than life, which they did with their bicycles.

In this particular case, the cat was already hunting so those instincts were already keyed up. But it's absolutely showing yourself as vulnerable," he said.

He recommended that people carry bear spray or bear bangers , which are loud flares intended to scare bears or other predators away. Salmoni theorized that perhaps the cougar was not raised by a parent. In that case, the younger male cougar might not have been taught by an adult how to hunt or what is and isn't cougar prey. That hunger and desperation may have been exacerbated by the competition between other male cougars, Corwin said.

Photograph by Chris Gidney.

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Adults stand about 60 to 76 centimeters 2. The length of adult males is around 2.

Males typically weigh 53 to 90 kilograms to pounds , averaging 62 kg lb. Females typically weigh between 29 and 64 kg 64 and lb , averaging 42 kg 93 lb.

Cougar size is smallest close to the equator and larger towards the poles. Photograph by Rob Walstrom. Females reach sexual maturity between one-and-a-half to three years of age. They typically average one litter every two to three years throughout their reproductive life.

Only females are involved in parenting and they are fiercely protective of their cubs.

Photograph by Tom Gill. Aside from humans, no species preys upon mature cougars in the wild.

The cat is not, however, the apex predator throughout much of its range. In its northern range, the cougar interacts with other powerful predators such as the brown bear and gray wolf. In the south, the cougar must compete with the larger jaguar. In Florida it encounters the American Alligator.

Like almost all cats, the cougar is a solitary animal. They started coming closer and closer, and they got within 50 yards of me when they turned and went into the woods. Reports of mountain lions — including one sighting near Greenville last month — have come in from all around the state in recent years. Reports every two weeks The cougar is the fourth-largest feline in the world and one of the most widely dispersed lions with subpopulations historically found throughout much of North and South America.

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The Eastern cougar — known variously as the mountain lion, puma, panther or catamount — once roamed from Canada to South Carolina and as far west as Michigan. Male cougars can weigh up to pounds and are distinguished by their long, thick tails. Viewed as a threat to humans and a pest to farmers, they were exterminated — supposedly — in the East by the early s.

The last documented mountain lion in Maine was killed near the Quebec border in Cougars have been reported in suburban Virginia, coastal South Carolina and in the rolling foothills of Delaware. Today, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife averages about one cougar report every two weeks, although they often come in spurts as one sighting prompts other reports. Reports of people releasing [captive] cougars into the wild are quite common.

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Science versus sightings Herein lies the root of the debate over mountain lions in Maine: Despite the hundreds of reported sightings and likely many more unreported ones , there have been only two confirmed free-roaming mountain lions in the past 20 years. Mountain lions may be elusive, but they are not invisible, according to Mark Dowling, whose nonprofit organization, The Cougar Network, has set the standard for confirming mountain lion sightings and tracking their gradual spread across the U.

They are going to be detected on a regular basis. In western and midwestern states with cougar populations — even small ones — the cats regularly are struck by cars, treed by dogs or caught on the untold thousands of motion- or heat-triggered cameras that hunters use to find game. But with the exception of the historic population of an estimated cougars in Florida — known there as Florida panthers — the network, as well as the U. Fish and Wildlife Service, insist the only mountain lions spotted in the East likely were raised in captivity and subsequently escaped or were released — illegally — by their owners.

Asked to explain the steady number of reports, Dowling replied: Yattaw said he had his own cougar encounter last August while he was driving through Owls Head on his way into work early one morning. At first, Yattaw thought the large, tan-colored animal in a field near the Owls Head Transportation Museum was either a deer or a coyote. As he got closer, eventually stopping and getting out of his car about feet from the mystery beast, the outdoorsman and former Registered Maine Guide realized it was far too large to be a coyote.