Recent cougar tracking tales

Okanagan · December 28, 2016, 11:37:21 PM

Grandson Code tracked a lion for more than two miles last week and when he thought he had caught up enough for it to hear his call, he called for it but without result.

At the tail end of my deer season Code came up to help me hunt deer (with my broken wrist in a cast) and one morning in snow we found where a lion had hunted for 200 yards along a mountainside and logging road. Its tracks had all been made early the night before. Thinking about it later I suspect that it had killed a deer and holed up with it because we saw no more of its tracks, but we kept hunting deer rather than sidetracking to try a lion call. In hindsight, we maybe should have tried calling it.

Son David tracked a cougar for two or three hours today, in thin, difficult snow. He said that it hunted the hardest and with the oddest pattern of any cougar that he has tracked. It tried for three deer during the section of its tracks he followed, but did not get any of the three. It would stalk a deer then make leaps of 25 feet or more trying to catch it. The odd pattern was that it changed direction and reversed direction many times, all on one big mountainside.

I gotta get out more.

FinsnFur · December 30, 2016, 05:11:57 PM

That would be a neat story to decode like that

Dave · December 31, 2016, 05:59:24 AM

Nice - hopefully you're getting out there. When do your seasons (deer and lion) go out?

Okanagan · December 31, 2016, 10:26:40 AM

Quote from: Dave on December 31, 2016, 05:59:24 AM
Nice - hopefully you're getting out there. When do your seasons (deer and lion) go out?

Is deer over for you yet?

Deer ended Dec. 15 here in BC. Cougar around here is open till the end of March and I think that is true for WA State where Code lives. Most years cougar is open till at least June 1 on Vancouver Island. I'd love to track one all day on gentle ground, not likely in our part of the world.

I've been a little more cautious going out in the slick snow with my broken wrist but plan to hunt lions at least one day this coming week. I have planned to hunt a couple of days recently but bagged it each time when snow conditions weren't useful. In my dotage now, I want optimum tracking snow or don't go.

Went to get my cast off yesterday but X-rays showed a worse break than they thought at first so they put on another cast a little tighter and more restrictive. I re-injured it on Christmas Eve pushing and straining the original cast a bit while showing grandkids a special knot. Have put on tire chains with the cast in place, rolled out pie crust, shoveled snow etc. The doc grinned but the nurse (and my wife) were not amused. I chose a camo colored cast this time. And yes, I have been thinking about how to skin a cougar using mostly one hand.

I have some use of the broken left one, but don't dare get any blood or liquid under the cast. I can put a plastic bread sack over it, as I do to take a shower.

Okanagan · December 31, 2016, 12:45:13 PM

Son David just phoned with an update. He is off work over the holidays and with good snow in his area, he has been out after cougars several days.

The day after he tracked the youngish cougar that had tried for three deer and failed, he went back and found a deer blood trail. On further backtracking etc. it turned out that the first deer that the cougar had â€œmissedâ€ was bleeding slightly. It had run wildly for at least 150 yards, farther than usual if a deer is merely spooked. And then it had started dripping blood, not a lot but enough to indicate that the cougar had gotten a piece of it, enough to make it bleed.

He came on a larger lion track and within 30 yards found a YOY deer that had been killed with barely a trace of struggle. He thought that he found it about 20 hours after the kill. He got some humor out of it that the mature cougar killed so easily while the youngster worked at it so hard and unsuccessfully. This is our best time to hunt lions since the deer are compacted into their â€œ10%â€ winter range, as David calls it.

He tried calling the cats, unsuccessfully, and when he returned to the kill yesterday, surprisingly no cat had returned to it. A few times before we have spooked a lion off of a kill and after a few hours they have come back and eaten more of it. David said that this cat was already gone when he found the deer and that he did not spook it off of the kill. It had eaten the heart and a bit of lungs and left the rest. He was not sure but it looked like possibly that the cougar he was tracking had taken a freshly killed deer from a different cougar that had killed it.

Interesting stories in the snow and I love to hear what he has found. Hope to get out myself tomorrow.

Okanagan · January 17, 2017, 02:16:19 PM

Another cougar tracking tale from my son who has been out a lot more than his old man. A few days ago he hiked a deer trail on a winter range mountainside looking for a lion track in an area where we have often found them. No luck till he turned around and headed back to his vehicle a mile or so away and then he found cougar tracks in his boot tracks he'd made on the way in. He called with no success, and then tracked the cat till he lost it in ragged thin patchy snow. Apparently it was a momma and her nearly grown youngster, and apparently they had tried for a deer unsuccessfully but it was difficult to decipher in poor snow conditions. Neither of us can figure why it/they did not come in to the call.

They were almost certainly within hearing range of his call sound. Maybe they already knew that it was a man making the sound and so stayed away,

but in our experience that often has not kept cats from coming to the call. The cougars that come to the call anyway either aren't smart enough to connect the sound with the man they know is there, or more likely, they don't care that it is a man and come in to look him over anyway.

FinsnFur · January 18, 2017, 10:25:46 PM

Maybe they came and went unseen. I dont have a ton of cat calling experience but I do recall hunting in Texas with the Hunting the Nightshift boys and more cats sat and stared then actually came walking in and made a presence. It took a whole lot of enticement to pull em off sit and stare mode.

Dave · January 19, 2017, 07:39:41 AM

Bet that was an extra exciting calling session though!

Okanagan · January 19, 2017, 02:14:09 PM

Quote from: FinsnFur on January 18, 2017, 10:25:46 PM
Maybe they came and went unseen. I dont have a ton of cat calling experience but I do recall hunting in Texas with the Hunting the Nightshift boys and more cats sat and stared then actually came walking in and made a presence. It took a whole lot of enticement to pull em off sit and stare mode.

Yep, that's common for a cat to sneak up and then sit and watch, and that's especially true for lions. I think I have posted about a cougar that my son glimpsed approaching us at the 14 minute mark after I started the call. The cat saw him and hid behind a bush. It lay down and made a full body print in the snow where it watched us for 38 minutes till some crows saw it and pestered it into leaving. On this cat the other day, he didn't find tracks of one approaching the call but the tracking snow was poor. Could be.