Stories from the Field: Cougar
As dusk sets in over the temperate rainforest in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, a large male Cougar pauses briefly while moving through the lush understory.
Early this autumn, I began exploring a watershed just outside the city of Vancouver, with these big cats in mind. More and more, I find that narrowing my focus in hopes of seeing through the eyes of a given animal brings about new perspectives on an environment, no matter how familiar it may have already felt. A feature of the landscape suddenly becomes more relevant and exciting, given its importance to the species of interest. Tracking here in this largely snow-free area comes with its challenges, however. Nearly every surface is covered in a dense layer of vegetation. Mosses, lichens, ferns, and shrubs overwhelm the understory; scenes that while picturesque, form a substrate that provides little opportunity for wildlife to leave behind visible clues. Tracks become imperceptible as what little of the loam you can see soon rebounds. Scat is often obscured by leaf litter or erased by heavy rain. Thankfully, there's nothing I enjoy more than pouring over maps, and trying to make sense of the little hints that are invariably out there, as discrete as they may be.
Ultimately, the goal was to photograph a Cougar with a DSLR camera trap. What this required was predicting an animal aligning with a square metre patch of forest floor, within its home range that’s conservatively 200 square km’s. To put that into more visual terms, that’s like a postage stamp on the ground within four city blocks. This large an area isn't used uniformly though, and the more I dissected the terrain, and considered the ecology of their prey, the vast expanse was whittled down to... a slightly less vast expanse. Having found some encouraging sign, my trail cameras confirmed the presence of two individuals frequenting a corridor in steep terrain that I hoped would act as a funnel.
Setting up my equipment, expectations were low, as it became clear the deer had left the area, and with them, likely the cats as well. After my Camtraptions gear lied in wait for five weeks, this impressive animal eventually returned at the onset of night, just hours after I had last visited the site.
