Epitaph for a Cougar

the Mahan Trail Cougar is dead. Shot last week, by the Conservation Officer and some houndsman from up the Coast. A couple of nights before she had killed two goats and eaten one, came back the following night for the other corpse. Unfortunately that was a dead give-away that she was still in the close area, so the houndsmen were brought over and it took them and the conservation officer 45 mins to “tree” her and shoot her. Murray is a good shot, they all are actually, so she won’t have suffered. Probably more scared and aware of the dogs at the bottom of the tree than the projectile winging its way to end it all.

the Mahan Trail Cougar is dead then, poor girl. Alas, I knew her well….. To me she was the Gospel Rock Cougar, the Mahan Trail skirting this area as a public trail bordering on one side housing and development , on the other side the thus far largely undeveloped (but logged in recent memory and slated for at least some development) uplands of the Gospel Rock area where I have been working for the last two or three years, studying, surveying, mapping and putting together an inventory of plants and wildlife.

I knew her well. Have known her for most of the time I have been working there. And her husband, who is probably still around. And some of her offspring, the one that stalked me a year or so ago on sunny summer Saturday afternoon, as I described in another story.  I even had a name for her, but I will keep that one to myself. Not out of piety… pure self preservation. Women of a certain age after all generally don’t seem to appreciate being associated with “cougar”, even more so as the local paper, the Coast Reporter, described her as “unusually large”, a BBC then, Big Beautiful Cougar…

large she was, as was, or rather hopefully still is, her husband. We came face to face a number of times over the years and their out-sized tracks were always in evidence. Unfortunately she was always too leery or I was much too slow, so I never managed to take a picture of her or her family. The only one I now have is of her dead, as published in the local paper. On a previous occasion when the houndsmen and Conservation Officer had been out to try and catch one of them, a shot was heard at 5.00 in the morning and we wondered whether they had been successful. A couple of visits to some known-to-us, favourite and likely spots that day and the next confirmed it. Nope. There they were: fresh, large, deep tracks. That time she outwitted them. Or wasn’t home more likely at the time; cougars do use a sizeable territory.

she had lived there or used the area for a number of years, never bothering humans. Never bothering me for three. Cougars don’t, unless they learn to think of people as prey and easy trappings at a very young age. And this one obviously hadn’t. The direct conflict only arose once it started eating livestock, pets really. But of course the underlying factor, fear of cougars, became the most important one. Once she had broken cover and the locals knew she was there, and there regularly, she had to go. The usual, unavoidable human-wildlife interface conflict.

ironically it is that very (developed) area that had fought so long and vigorously to keep the Gospel Rock uplands in its natural state, for people and wildlife to enjoy and live together, that insisted the cougar had to be dealt with. Too dangerous. No surprise really: one of the main conclusions of the recent survey carried out for the Town of Gibsons Parks Master Plan was that the respondents wanted to be able to enjoy unspoilt, pristine nature and wilderness, close to home, as natural as possible and that, in order to be able to do so, Council should remove Blackberry (as they attract bears), bears themselves and cougars of course. Nature, you see, only consists of non-scary, fuzzy species. Now if only the lion would lie with the lamb again…

so she has gone. Her place will without a doubt soon be taken by another one. Vacant territory with meat on the hoof… Coastal Blacktail deer. The time this will take is going to depend very much on what this winter is going to be like. Last year was unusually cold and long, resulting in a terrible foaling year for Coastal Blacktails on the mountains. Blacktails didn’t come down so much, they stay and perish where they are, where they are used to. But their predators, those that live on them and are much more enterprising, do and did and found a modest but ready larder of fresh Blacktails in our “urban” wildlife areas as well as bite-sized and easily accessible snacks in the form of our pet livestock. Chickens, llama’s, goats, sheep…

this year we had over 140 complaints about cougars here, 50-odd from the Mahan Trail area alone, whereas 20 to 30 or so for the whole Sunshine Coast is normal. We’ll have to see what this winter does; a mild one, and that is what it is looking like so far, and there will be plenty of food on the mountain and less need for cougars to come down and expose themselves to an environment they don’t enjoy whatsoever, us. So we and they may get a break. But inevitably it will happen again and cougars will be the losers. Hopefully my male, her husband, is old and grey by then. Or the “threat” of cougars is overtaken by the fear of grizzly, underway to here again after an absence of over 100 years or so…. Fingers crossed.