First Saturday Green 101: The liquid yellow eyes...

...of a predator

By motomynd

As the plane taxied toward the terminal I turned on my phone. A text message immediately lit the screen: “Be careful when you go home. I drove by a few minutes ago and there were cops and animal control trucks all over the place.”
    This was not good news.
    My 161-year-old house in Virginia rests on wooded suburban acreage surrounded by modern look-alike houses with manicured lawns. I maintain it as a wildlife sanctuary. It was such when my family bought it in 1956; it is more such now. To establish the setting, a city attorney once called it “a place in violation of so many codes I hardly know where to begin.” To which my lawyer pointed out that the codes when the house was built, back in 1852, and when the city annexed that part of the county in 1970, were quite different, and my wooded acreage was arguably as “grandfathered” as my right to still use wood heat, if I so chose. Given that to ponder, the city attorney has never pursued the point officially—but if the slightest opening presents itself, police and officials come sweeping through looking for anything that might clearly win a court case.
    Based on the text, this time they must have found something spectacular.

On the drive home I called my two trusted neighbors, old-school guys like myself who actually appreciate the excellent pruning done by my resident deer herd. John, elderly and retired, didn’t answer, which most likely meant he and his wife were either in their yard or at a baseball game. Roy answered on the second ring: “Guess you heard there was trouble, huh? Someone saw a mountain lion on the hill beside your house.”
    This was bitterly ironic. I was returning from California, where mountain lions—also traditionally known as panthers or cougars—are fairly common, and where they earn much media exposure because they occasionally attack people. I had seen plenty of warning signs on trails and had spent some time pondering the best strategy if I were attacked. Unfortunately I saw no lions in the flesh. To think that while I was gone someone had seen one in my yard in Virginia—where there hasn’t been an officially confirmed sighting in 130 years—was just too much.
    “So should I rush there fast as I can?” I asked.
    “No,” Roy answered. “Animal control is looking all over the place. And there is a SWAT team with dogs.”
    This was really bad news.

My wildlife sanctuary conceals a clandestine feral cat preserve—animal control people do not like that. When a new cat shows up I immediately trap it, have it vaccinated and spayed or neutered, give it a few days to recover, then release it to join the pride. Animal control considers such cats dangerous and diseased, even though we have never had a case of rabies or any other serious illness. Animal control also laments the “carnage” from wild cats killing birds. Never mind that I can document 106 different species of birds sighted on my property, while my neighbors would be lucky to find 10 birds total in the short grass around their houses, which is cut to golf-course standards and provides about as much food and cover as a paved driveway.
    When the “all clear” call finally came I drove home and got the scoop on the situation. A neighbor had seen a “grayish looking mountain lion” lying on a flat rock in an open area on the hill, about 75 yards north of my side porch. The “big long-tailed cat” watched her watch it for a few moments then sauntered unconcerned into the woods. She immediately dialed 9-1-1 and chaos ensued.
    My first instinct was of course to dismiss the sighting as a mistake. Most likely it was a bobcat, or possibly a young black bear; they travel through every few years. But there were three details worth noting: Over the years there have been several unsubstantiated sightings of mountain lions within 10 miles of my home; the rock is in clear view and is less than 50 yards from the road; and the neighbor’s official description said the animal had “an incredibly long tail.” That last bit is particularly important, because mountain lions have tails that are so long they seem disproportionate to their bodies.

The next few days at the house were adrenaline-filled, compared to normal suburban standards. A bird would flush as I walked through the yard, and I would spin, fearing the worst. When my resident herd of deer started acting spooky and then disappeared for a couple of days, I felt that same strange tingling in the back of my neck that I had previously noticed only when trail-running in Africa and Alaska.
    In Africa I had to go up a tree because a lioness showed up unexpectedly. This would not help with a mountain lion—they can make a 15-foot vertical leap and readily climb trees. They weigh much less than African lions, and they almost always flee humans rather than attack, but when things go wrong between mountain lions and people, they generally go horribly wrong. Just playing with my cats I am injured more often than I was when rescuing pit bulls and other dogs that were actually used in fighting rings, so the idea of taking on a six-foot cat that would weigh 100 to 200 pounds was unnerving.
    While roaming around my yard and surrounding woods, I suddenly developed great interest in shooting better quality video and took to carrying a stout stick that doubled as a monopod. I began to smell scents that I had never noticed around here in any of the preceding 55 years, and my hearing grew ever more acute. Just as I seemed about to return to some sort of long-lost cave-dweller roots, I had to drive to “the other house” in North Carolina. When I returned to Virginia 10 days later, the cave-man instincts had waned and all was again calm in suburbia.

Two weeks passed. For possibly the ten-thousandth time in my life, I was exploring the small creek that runs on the north border of the property—when I sensed a movement over my right shoulder. Turning slowly I saw a large gray head accented by the liquid yellow eyes of a feline predator. The head was less then 15 feet away. A tautly muscled gray body angled back from it, and a disproportionately long tail trailed yet further behind. Here in my own backyard, I was being stalked by one of the most skilled hunters in the Western Hemisphere.
    For a moment I was back up that tree in Africa, looking down at a lioness who was circling the base of the tree, assessing her options, and deciding if I was worth the effort. And I remembered that trail run in Alaska when the brush and fog thickened, the midnight sun faded to gray, and out of the gloaming a wolf stood up to meet me.
    Coming to my senses, I remembered the small camera hanging from its strap around my neck, and I raised it to cover my face. Avoiding eye contact, I carefully focused the lens on this wonderful wild creature—and began taking photos. It froze in place for a few moments, realized it had been spotted, and bounded away.

As you can see from the photo, it does look quite a bit like a mountain lion. It is more grayish than most, but the eyes and that ultra-long tail are spot on. “Little Gray” is now the newest member of my feral pride, and the way he holds his own with the older and larger cats shows he may indeed be mountain lion in heart and spirit, if less than one-tenth the size in body.

    He lives as he arrived, punching well above his weight. Just a wild cat with an unusually long tail, resting on a rock and wondering if he had finally found a home, he brought a rush of excitement to a bored woman driving to a boring job, and to my neighbors and all who were involved in responding to her 9-1-1 call. And he spun me through the decades to a time when the yard was a place of vast wildness and impossible imaginings—back when I was a child armed with my first camera, stalking squirrels and rabbits and feral cats, and dreaming of the day they would be lions, tigers, and bears.
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Copyright © 2013 by motomynd

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