Kat's Mountain Lion Photos (Trail Camera Photography)

[Kattt]

Jerry, I see bobcats pretty regularly but I would have thought it was just the same one. I saw the mountainlion twice at night and once on the trail….so I knew it was there but I did not know there were three. I have learned a lot from this experience and that probably been the best part. I definitively had no idea about the Golden Eagles right here.

[Dave T]

Great bobcat pictures too!

Nice!

[Anonymous]

"Three different bobcats. The first one has long untattered ears . The middle one is the chubbiest, with smaller, rounder ears. The third has long, battlefield ears"

I'll bet the guy with the scars has more kids than all the rest put together.

Rough neighborhood for Bambis.

All in all a marvelous series of pictures. Thanks again for sharing, Katharina.

[brian H]

That is Good Stuff!

[Kattt]

A couple more..

And thank you everyone!

[Greg Mihalik]

It's been fun watching the grass grow.

Watching them through the seasons would be wonderful.

[Kattt]

No big cats since last Saturday, but a few other critters.

This is from this morning

One of the few resident foxes

This camera has the wrong date on it. Happened when I changed batteries…

If only this was a mountain lion :)

My goofy Kylie taking a trail cam selfie yesterday . My car broke down the night before; my back up pick up broke down on the way to work at 5:30 am so I stayed home and went for a ride with my older daughter. Laughed so much it hurt.

This one is older…..me ( pun there ??) after doing some trail clearance with my 12" chainsaw :)

[Bob Gross]

Good work.

Any catnip in use?

–B.G.–

[Kattt]

Hi Bob,
No, I have not used any catnip. I even have some, I just never think of it when I head out.

[Bob Gross]

It's just an idea.

Use catnip at half of your trail cameras and none at the other half. See if it makes any difference.

–B.G.–

[Anonymous]

"One of the few resident foxes"

Tough neighborhood for a fox to make a living.

[Sharon J.]

do your video cameras have audio capabilities?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2014/05/04/309038580/listen-to-these-lovely-cats-no-actually-don-t

[Greg Mihalik]

I think those two cats are trying to determine who is alpha (or beta). The one facing the camera has ears forward, is sitting, and is confident. The other has ears back and is ready to run. The one with it's back to the camera does a "look away", an acquiescing behavior, and it eventually moves away. And nobody got chewed up.

As for why they choose that particular "vocabulary" …. they're cats. They don't sound a whole lot different than city cats on a fence.

[Bob Gross]

Greg, where is all of this cat language with ears explained? Inquiring minds want to know. The only thing I've seen is when a cat is mad, it lays its ears back flat like it is expecting a fight.

–B.G.–

[Greg Mihalik]

I get it from dog behavior, but it crosses to cats pretty well. It is amazingly complex and fast.

http://www.amazon.com/Canine-Body-Language-Photographic-Interpreting/dp/1929242352/ref=sr_1_3/187-8200315-2336743?ie=UTF8&qid=1399234203&sr=8-3&keywords=dog+language

My wife volunteers for the local shelter facilitating canine "play and manners", so I've watched a lot of professionally narrated video.

[BlackHatGuy]

Interesting video Sharon. Kinda reminds me of the 'discussions' in chaff, for some reason……

[peter vacco]

so: i found this awesome tree on my last trip. is this fantastic life form a giant Ponderosa, or a giant Sequoia ? or am i confused ?

i know.. it's a cs thread drift. but .. humor me ….

Thank You for your help.

cheers,
v.

[Justin Baker]

peter, where was that picture taken and at about what elevation?
Do you have any more pictures? Can you describe the needles? That's a really blurry picture.

My guess is a ponderosa or jeffery pine. Ponderosa and jeffery are very similar trees with 3 needles per bundle. The only way to tell them apart is by grabbing a cone – "prickly ponderosa, gentle jeffery". The ponderosa has outward facing prickles and is uncomfortable to hold. With the jeffery you can hold onto a cone comfortably.

Giant redwoods don't have the typical long pine needle like leaves. They have leaves with overlapping scales, similar to an incense cedar.

I've been taking a tree/shrub taxonomy class this year and it's become a fun hobby while backpacking. I'll take samples along the way and identify them in camp.

[Marko Botsaris]

Peter, hard to tell from that distance for sure, but it looks like a Ponderossa the morning after a serious bender. Fun fact about Ponderosas, on the older ones if you peel some of the bark off and sniff it it smells a little like vanilla. However if the wrong people see you doing this they will think you are very weird. True story!

Giant Sequoia (gigantea) are very isolated in certain spots in the Sierra, and are in fact gradually going extinct, or so it is speculated.

http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/sequoias_of_yosemite/distribution.html

If you weren't in one of these very few localized spots you can be sure it wasn't one. It doesn't look at all like sempervirens, branches or bark – I have got them in my yard. It looks like it is a pine.

A good way to ID a plant or tree is to take close up pictures for later. On trees leaves/needles, cone/nuts and bark. Also great for flowers if you take a close of of both the petals and the leaves. So much lighter that a giant plant press like John Muir carried around in the early days.

But on the big cat front, a few days ago my neighbors a few houses up from me went around and put flyers in all mailboxes that they found two mountain lions in their driveway when the came home at night, and to keep an eye on the local pets. My first thought was "well duh, of course they are around all the time here", and then my second through was "whaa!…why couldn't they have camped in MY driveway". I still have not seen any in the flesh in spite of hearing stories about people seeing them a few hundred feet away from my house every 6 months or so!

[Kattt]

This one is a male, collared and tracked. That makes for sure at least three that pass within 200 yards from my house. This one was higher up on the ridge. Left a scrape right in front of the camera.

.

And these are the three mugshots.

@Sharon, my Bushnell have audio capability but it has been very faint and only activated by the motion sensor.

[Kattt]

The sad part first. The young female now has a big chunk of flesh missing from the top of her tail. Not only is this risky because of infection, it makes her hunting much more difficult. The long tail helps them balance during the high speed chases and this injury could make that much more difficult. I hope she recovers!
This is her the other day passing by one camera

And the other camera showing her injury. This location is a "community scraping area" and the males are leaving scrapes while the female just sniffed around a bit.

This is a picture of a tracked male I posted last time, but posting again because it is the same location. After this guy scraped here and just to the side of this camera as well, I added another camera pointed 90 degrees from this one to catch both spots.

Here is the new male coming along to mark both spots.

This I am posting because….the muscles !!

These next shots were way underexposed so I brightened them with IPhoto but could not get them to look the same. I have a video of this as well. Oh, dates on these are wrong, need to reset the camera …

This might just be one of my favorites

The reason I put the camera in this location to begin with was a number of tracks I found, what it looked like on Google Earth ( a saddle that connects two basins that are divided by a mountain) and this scrape

This last one looks like a pretty big boy. Here is a composite picture of my daughter and I with silly hats ( she wanted goofy trail cam selfies…) in the same location as the cat.

And now my first daytime gray fox :)

[Greg Mihalik]

Nice.

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

"Nice.

Thanks"

+1

Tough luck for that female.

[Kattt]

Thanks Greg.
Funny to read the title of my thread now…I was sooo excited to get those first night time shots from behind. A lot has happened since. Beyond anything I was thinking back then.

[TKB 1979]

Wow!

[Author]

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