# Cougar in the city park



## white-knuckle (Mar 4, 2010)

Sometimes I like to look up Cougar sightings. I just like to hear the reports. It's something from time to time I like to study. I remembered reading about a cougar in Discovery park a couple years back. I didn't know the city well at the time so I didn't think much into it.


Cougar Incident Reports | Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife


I went camping a couple of weeks ago in Oregon. My fiance's friend was having a belated riding birthday bash. I did a bit of hiking, used my slingshot, and hung out by the fire to chat with the guys. At night a "mountain man" showed up with a big truck with a group of hound dogs. At first they were in dog cages and then he leashed them to the rack he had on top. 

They had red blinking lights and gps. He was practicing with his new gps equipment. He was going to practice hunting bobcats/cougars. Basically, he drives on these expansive back mountain roads (old logging roads) and when the dogs howl it means, "they smell cat." I think the season opens December first (but I could be mistaken).









I thought that was pretty interesting. I don't know what I think about cougar/bob cat hunting. I'd have to read into it. I know cougars are pretty intimidating and I just haven't read enough to have an opinion on the boundaries. Though I do know they have hardly killed/harm people. There's like a hundred reports for the whole U.S. for the past 100 years. Of course, of what's reported and more importantly, there's always unaccounted disappearances. At one point the Lion used to eat people pretty regularly like a couple hundred thousand over a hundred year period maybe about a couple hundred years ago. 

So, I was thinking about cougars. Most of my family thinks it's silly how much I like to read about em but I just find it fascinating. We had some encounters while living out in the country and I used to walk through the woods, and if I ever walked too far on the beach and had to come up the trail close/during dusk, I was pretty nervous. Usually they like to stalk, anyways. So, most of the time you wouldn't know they were following you. Actually, I read about a family hiking. Their young son was hiking ahead and the cougar jumped out and put his jaw on his head and was trying to drag him into the woods. Well, the parents came and shooed the cougar, hands on pushed, shoved, tackled. They retrieved their son and went down the mountain they were climbing. The wildlife expert later had tracked that the cougar stalked them the entire route down the mountain (and they had no inclination of this). 









I guess in tracking cougars they find they'll stalk for hours. The eeriest story I read was about some sort of wildlife expert tracking a cougar. The cougar knew this. It walked backwards in it's own steps and climbed a tree and waited for him.

I was reading about Discovery Park. There were a couple of people who reported seeing a cougar back in 2009, so they shut down the park and caught the cougar and relocated it to Enumclaw. I guess back in 1981 they had a similar incidence with a 2 year old male.

Well, I went on google maps. To try to determine how and if it jumped from greenbelt to greenbelt. All I saw were big bridges, major roads, and the possibilities just dwindled and vanished about the cougar getting there by land and not being seen. I couldn't imagine it crossing train tracks and neighborhoods and 4 lane busy roads. 

(Map of Discovery Park and Bainbridge Island--)
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=disc...bih=714&dpr=1&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=N&tab=wl

Then I looked across the water to Bainbridge Island. I pulled up some Cougar reports from the area. Of course there were other wooded areas across the water, but that was the closest. I am pretty sure the cougar swam across. I went on google and saw some rare footage of a cougar swimming in the water. They will do it if they have to. They will do it for hunting purposes and so forth.

(Video of Cougar swimming in Puget Sound)
[video=youtube;1kDDP_sqH30]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kDDP_sqH30"][video=youtube;1kDDP_sqH30]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kDDP_sqH30[/VIDEO[/video]

I think the cougar from 1981 did as well. The layout in the city has been the same since like the 50s so it seems water was the route too. There was little information I could find from wild life experts. Like if it looked like the cougar was released by some one who held it illegally or any ideas on where it came from, at least in any of the news articles I read.

I know the two year old male (1981) was at the age where he leaves his mother. At that point they are on the run. Other male cougars are very territorial. They have about two females to a territory and have a territory between 60 square miles and larger, depending on the amount of food source. So, the young male cougar will be chased/beat up and running for its life from other males. 

People are more likely to have encounters (and negative ones) with female cougars with offspring (who catch something about every other day, whereas the other cougars catch something about every 1 or two weeks.) And also the young male cougars (who are looking for a territory to settle and on the defensive). 









So, that's my theory. The cougar was on the run and the only way off of that island was to swim. He may have very well swam to that island from across the way too. Discovery Park became his "territory" for a short while. It makes me wonder could he smell or see that there was a spot that might be sufficient across the way. Why Discovery Park and not an area with more people? Does it swim on the shore til it finds an ideal spot? Did it do this at night? I know deer will swim across to islands. Some islands are a safe harbor from being hunted by predators. I saw it one day at the beach. There were two deer swimming in the Puget Sound and probably across the way to Harstine Island. 

I guess I just found that fascinating. And love to ponder little puzzles like that. The other wild life puzzle I was pondering this week was wild Huckleberries and how efforts to domesticate them have failed, for the most part. So, where they do grow are quickly stripped by commercial interests, families, and native Yakama tribe that uses the huckleberry for spiritual purposes.








My fiances grandpa's farm is in wine country. Though they haven't used it for such purposes. Though on their street are some pretty wealthy vineyards. It has to do with the way the sun hits the land, on which grape to grow, and especially in terms of elevation. I want to say it was like between 300 and 600 feet was the optimum elevation. Well, the same with huckleberries but with thousands of feet in elevation to grow. 

Then I guess from reading about the bear population and how plants are a huge source of what they eat, I was curious about bears, especially the grizzly bear and how it's pushed more north each year. And about there being between 13 and 30 grizzly bears from North Cascades in Southern British Columbia down to Snoqualmie, Washington. I guess I wondered about the effects of the Huckleberries being stripped from the mountains. The commercial industry hacks at the bushes too. To quickly pick berries they chop down parts of the bushes. Some don't recover and some don't grow back.

(All the redish parts on pictures are huckleberries!)









My favorite wine I've drank is Huckleberry wine. It's hard to find something that doesn't have Reisling mixed with Huckleberries. I did find a bottle and read that it took about 2 pounds of Huckleberries. Though the source was from Montana and furthermore they don't ship it to Washington (but do to Oregon  . Still it makes me wonder where the Huckleberry wine I had once came from? Unless it was all the recent alcohol changes we've had, from being state run to private. 

Anyways, it's just sad to see. It just seems we can't help but make plants, animals, and trees dwindle. That we just keep polluting the lands. I recently read about how some beaches in Hawaii were closed because like a 1300 gallon molasses spill which polluted the waters and killed tons of fish. Meaning it attracted a lot of sharks, eels, and so forth. I just don't get when we'll learn. I'm also pretty upset that the Hanford nuclear weapons enrichment facility clean up in Washington is expected to be trillions of dollars. It's the most contaminated nuclear sight in the U.S. With 53 million gallons of waste and already 1 million gallons having leaked. Just lots of lies that they had the nuclear waste under control, and bunches of lies to cover many years of leakage.


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## white-knuckle (Mar 4, 2010)

Alright, I did some more reading. The local wild life experts said that it may have followed the train tracks. Their reasoning is the bears sometimes follow the train tracks. I still think that could be a possibility but still think it would've had to cross a body of water. The tracks that go from Ballard to Magnolia, the bridge is usually up unless in use. Plus, there are large gaps in greenbelts. It would've been a very dodgy journey to Discovery Park via the train track route. I guess coyotes live in Greenbelts. I did see a Doe in Tukwilla next to the freeway and was wondering where it would've come from. 

I of course also read about the cougars North of Seattle, in British Columbia, swim from Island to Island in search of food. There's some great footage of it as well.

For some reason the bears following the train tracks reminds me of when I lived on the KP and the bears took over the local dump. When the sun went down they came down there and feasted. It was such an issue they had to relocate the bears.


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