Cougar

I spent two months last winter in a mountain cabin far up a back road in Washington's Methow Valley, just below the Canadian border and just east of the North Cascade National Park, where there are many cougars. One broke into my nearest neighbor's house and I found fresh tracks one morning beside the road into town. So with all the cougar excitement in the Valley, I decided to learn more about them by reading this book. It's a good place to start if you want to know more about the big cats that are becoming a more common part of life throughout the West .Cougar! is a comprehensive historical and natural history coverage of the cats by a retired National Park Service employee. Besides a description of cougar habits and hunting techniques with each of their prey species, interesting chapters describe the human-cougar relationship from Native Americans and Colonial times, through the bounty hunter years and on to the present.There is a fascinating section in Cougar! that describes all documented cougar attacks, both fatal and non-fatal, in the U.S. and Canada from 1751 through mid-1998. Danz reports that the only fatal cougar attack in the United States between 1909 and 1974, was of a 13-year old boy traveling on snowshoes near Lake Chelan (not far from my winter retreat) in December 1924. When his body was found it was deduced that the young victim had cut off one of the cougar's front claws (!) while unsuccessfully defending himself with a pocketknife. Contemporary cougar fans may find poetic justice in descriptions of two recent non-fatal incidents where National Park campers were forced by cougars to spend the night up in a tree (!) until someone came to their assistance. There is also a description of historic and current cougar populations in each state (Washington, with 2,300, has one of the largest populations) and Canadian province, as well as the exhaustive bibliography you'd expect from a university press.I really enjoyed Cougar!, and while the grainy black and white photos don't compare with those in Mountain Lion, it is the much more informative and interesting of the two books.

Cougar! is a comprehensive historical and natural history coverage of the cats by a retired National Park Service employee. Besides a description of cougar habits and hunting techniques with each of their prey species, interesting chapters describe the human-cougar relationship from Native Americans and Colonial times, through the bounty hunter years and on to the present. There is a fascinating section in Cougar! that describes all documented cougar attacks, both fatal and non-fatal, in the U.S. and Canada from 1751 through mid-1998. Danz reports that the only fatal cougar attack in the United States between 1909 and 1974, was of a 13-year old boy traveling on snowshoes near Lake Chelan in December 1924. When his body was found it was deduced that the young victim had cut off one of the cougar's front claws while unsuccessfully defending himself with a pocketknife. Contemporary cougar fans may find poetic justice in descriptions of two recent non-fatal incidents where National Park campers were forced by cougars to spend the night up in a tree (!) until someone came to their assistance. There is also a description of historic and current cougar populations in each state (Washington, with 2,300, has one of the largest populations) and Canadian province, as well as the exhaustive bibliography you'd expect from a university press. I really enjoyed Cougar!, and while the grainy black and white photos don't compare with those in some other books it is extremely informative and interesting.

Exellent coverage of North America's big cat. A detailed history as well as an human/cougar encounter list of recorded attacks. great infomation on life and physiology of my favorite animal.