Somehow it just works this way. I dream up an animal I want to study and know more about, then decide to try and track it. But it just doesn’t work as I plan. This winter it was martens, yet I didn’t see one track. But instead of the animal I had in mind, another one presents itself. This time its cats, and not just little cats, but cougars.
Remember I saw that mountain lion track, tried to follow it, but lost it pretty quickly.
Yesterday I went back to the area and ran into two older cougar deer kills. Today I went with my camera to record them and inspect them better. First I headed to a small rock ledge where the cougar obviously dragged his kill.
What was left was a lot of fur and the rumen, still perfectly intact. What I discovered is that cougars open the carcass and remove the rumen like a surgeon. When you find a canine kill site, the rumen remains are scattered and opened up. Canines tear their prey apart messily. Cats are very methodical. Cats are unable to synthesize vitamin A, so they must get it from the internal organs of their prey, what they gorge on first usually.
This site had absolutely no bones, only tons of plucked hair, the rumen, and a large pile of scat. There was a cache mound but only hair underneath.
I headed for another site I’d seen yesterday where a male fawn was killed. It’s near a meadow, so I assumed the fawn was killed in the meadow and dragged to this secluded spot in the trees. Again the rumen and testicles this time, still intact from over the winter, the fur plucked and a very few bones–mostly the skull which was split in two.
Now after I left this spot I’d found yesterday, I ran into three more old stashed kills in the same general area. Wow, cougars are an efficient killing machine. All these other sites were old and had one thing in common that was interesting: all the sites had a lot of plucked hair and had covered mounds. Underneath all these covered mounds was only hair, no bones or carcass. I assumed that this was where the carcass was first dragged to, then plucked. The carcass was moved after that for a second feeding, but only after the original area was covered. I am perplexed why the site with no carcass remains anymore still needed to be covered. If the carcass with covered, then re-visited and consumed, it would seem unnecessary to then re-cover it. Under all these mounds, only fur. A mystery yet for me to solve.
One site had scratch marks on the ground (you can see the mound and in front of it the area is clean where the cat scratched with its back legs. There were scratch marks in the dirt that are visible too). I understand that mostly it’s males that scratch like this.
A tree in this cache circle had these marks on it that were old–are these cougar scratches?
Not too far away Koda found a leg here or there. I found the hide scattered as well. This was an older kill, not this winter, so scavengers probably already got to it long ago.
I found several other sites like this, all in a fairly small radius–all around a rocky rise. How exciting this was to explore this cougar(s) territory and see his tracks. I learned a lot just reading, exploring, observing, tracking. I went home with the desire to find a good cougar video, but just couldn’t find any; then by serendipity, I turned on the Monday night National Geographic Channel featuring Wild America with an hour feature on cougar tracking! What a great cougar day. Now I hope to see one of these beautiful elusive animals some day.
The Human Footprint 
I was surprised at the plucked hair! I thought only birds did that. I would have expected to find skin and hair pretty much intact. Very interesting.
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