Cougar Tracks

It's snowed a couple of nights in the past few days. On Wednesday morning I went biking with a friend from school. We were interested in checking some trails out that we'd hiked on previously and figured we'd cover more ground on bikes. Part of the way through we ran into a community schooler (Wilderness Awareness School's high school age program) and shortly after that we came upon some cougar tracks (from the previous night or the morning) with a bunch of community school tracks next to them. We trailed the tracks for a couple of miles along a logging road before running into a new group of kids and their leader. They had taken a break from trailing the cougar to try and build a fire in the wet woods. We talked to them for a bit and they told us that they had just heard on the handheld radio that one of the other groups had found something really cool, but it wasn't clear what. We continued on up the hill a short ways before seeing another bigger set of mountain lion tracks coming across the road. We looked up in the woods to see if we could trail that cat, but it was difficult in the duff. I did find a bird kill though, it was laying there - a bunch of feathers with a gut pile sitting on top. I'd never seen a kill site with a gut pile before, so that was interesting. I'm not sure what the bird was but I would guess it was around grouse size. After that we kept on up the road and didn't watch as closely for the cougar tracks and the next time we stopped to look for them they were gone. We thought that maybe the first one had left the road around the same place where the second one crossed. A couple miles later we stopped and built a fire (but that's another story), then headed back for home.

The friend lives with two of the community school intructors so after we got back home he called me to let me know what the cool thing was that they had found. Turns out some of the students had backtracked the cougar a short distance from where we picked up the trail and found a dead buck that the cougar had been eating on.