IslandHopping
BigCatVille
The Panthera Corporation is a non-profit group that is devoted to maintaining wild cat ecosystems worldwide.
Recently, they have been tracking cougars on the Olympic Peninsula, which, if you live in Victoria, you can probably see from your house and/or any highpoint with a south facing view.
Melissa Breyer, writing for Treehugger, has that story:
Imagine that!
Recently, they have been tracking cougars on the Olympic Peninsula, which, if you live in Victoria, you can probably see from your house and/or any highpoint with a south facing view.
Melissa Breyer, writing for Treehugger, has that story:
...As part of Panthera’s Olympic Cougar Project, a research initiative on the Peninsula, a mother cougar and her 1½-year-old son, known as M161, were outfitted with GPS collars to track their movement. The press release explains what happened next:
“To scientists’ astonishment, M161 spent several months on land after his collaring before swimming 1.1 km [.68 miles] from the eastern edge of the Peninsula to Puget Sound’s Squaxin Island. Based on this journey, scientists estimate that at least 3,808 of the Salish Sea’s 6,153 islands could be accessible to ‘island hopping’ cougars.”...
Imagine that!
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8 comments:
Oh, this is about large cats. When I saw your headline, I thought it would be about something else. That talk about "a mother cougar and her 1½-year-old son" was about as close as it got.
I'm sticking with my answer as to why I don't swim in salt water. toooo damn cold. Here's a link to the same topic.... amazing stuff you on your Posts RossK!!
BioOne Complete
Abstract:
https://bioone.org/journals/northwestern-naturalist/volume-103/issue-3/1051-1733-103.3.236/ISLAND-HOPPING-COUGARS-PUMA-CONCOLOR-IN-THE-SALISH-SEA/10.1898/1051-1733-103.3.236.short
17 November 2022
ISLAND HOPPING COUGARS (PUMA CONCOLOR) IN THE SALISH SEA
Andrew Stratton, Read Barbee, Kim Sager-Fradkin, Bethany Tropp Ackerman, L Mark Elbroch
Anecdotal and quantitative evidence of the Cougar's (Puma concolor) ability to swim across large bodies of water remains limited in the scientific literature. etc
Cap--
To quote the Pixies of yore...'Where is my mind?'
In all honesty I didn't even realize what I had done there.
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NVG--
Ya, same folks!
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And this is news?
The last cougar shot and killed in Tsawwassen in the late 50's, evidently island hopped from Vancouver island to the Gulf islands and then on to Tsawwassen!
I think time has erased the memories of the abilities of large mammals to swim great distances.
Grizzlies swim across from the mainland to the mid-north Island from time to time, the furthest south I have seen reported was on Quadra Island, a 10 minutes ferry ride from Campbell river.
https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/quadra-island-man-makes-international-headlines-after-encounter-with-grizzly-bear-1.5464088
Sayward, 75kms. north of Campbell River.
https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/in-rare-sighting-for-island-at-least-7-grizzly-bears-spotted-near-sayward-4681326
Takaya was a lone wolf the commuted between James Bay that lived on discovery Island, just off Victoria.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/legacy-of-famous-b-c-wolf-killed-by-hunter-lives-on-as-a-conservation-project-1.5965981
My neighbour was wetting a line from his tin boat in Lambert Channel (between Denman and Hornby Islands), his daily habit early in the morning. Off the southern tip of Denman he spotted a cougar swimming toward the farm on the southern tip of Hornby. As he followed it, he phoned the authorities because that farm grazes sheep. To his dismay, by the time the two of them neared the shore on Hornby, two men with rifles had stationed themselves on the beach and simply shot the cougar as it came ashore. Stewart was in a quandary: “I don’t know what else I could have done…”
This cougar obviously got to Denman by swimming from the Big Island, swimming thence to Hornby.
On the Big Island of Vancouver, the patchy quilt work of old-, second-, third-growth forest is bountiful for black tail deer (fresh clearcuts provided lots of nutritious brush). A few miles inland, the Beaufort Range’s east slope is said to be the highest density of cougar known anywhere. Friends who live on the other side from me admit that cougar are regularly shot on the QT: even though permissible to protect life, limb and property (pets and farm animals), reporting such a shooting initiates a bureaucratic nightmare about which residents strung along the shore of Baynes Sound have acculturated a sort of detente where nobody reports any such shooting. A backfired official policy, you might say.
Young male cougars are bound to look for new territory but are too inexperienced to realize that satisfying pangs at the expense of house pets and hobby farm animals is not tolerated by residential vigilantes. The good news is: there’s simply no shortage of cougar. In fact, there are probably more of them now—due to all the logging over the last 140 years—than there used to be in their “natural” ecosystem.
After putting down my last hound (on Denman), I spotted some scat on the spot under the big cedar where she used to sleep out of the rain. I soaked it and examined the contents. Lots of small rodents and bird beaks—but, unmistakably, the teeth of house cats. Lots of them. Yep, that was a cougar. Kinda creepy to know that while you’re scooting to the outhouse at night, there might be somebody watching from the dark.
I worked in the woods for three decades, including in the subject area, and I only saw live cougars twice. Much more often you see their tracks in the snow following yours when you walk out at the end of the shift. They are the main reason I took my hounds to work with me: a cougar would sooner jump one of them than me.
When I heard grizzlies had finally swam over to the Big Island (I worked regularly around Campbell Lakes and Sayward), I retired.
A cougar on Protection Island in Nanaimo harbour. It swam from the big Island to Newcastle Island a short hop in Nanaimo harbour, than swam to Protection.
https://globalnews.ca/news/9377647/cougar-prowls-small-b-c-island/
They have also been seen on Salt Spring – Galiano etc. The suckers are swimming everywhere LOL.
https://www.discovervancouverisland.com/blog/cougar-swimming-story/
Humans tend to under estimate other animals around them.Some of those animals have a better brain and work ethic than humans.
I've never seen a cougar in the wild, even though I've travelled all over B.C.
I've had a bear try to gain entry to my home but that is about it. There most likely are a lot of courgars in the Comox Valley with all the deer around.
Lets hope the cougars continue to thrive in B.C. and we need to try to not swim too close to them. It is rather concerning with all the plastic in the ocean that cougars are forced to swim in it.
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