Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

Last Thursday night, coming home from Washington DC, driving through Eldorado Canyon State Park at dusk on the way to my house, I saw the first mountain lion I've ever seen.  In fact, I saw two.  And they were big, somehow much bigger than I had imagined them to be, and much scarier.  The small lizard brain that says, "Be afraid, be very afraid," was speaking loudly.  I saw them ahead of the car in the one lane dirt road that goes through the park, and then they climbed up an angled rock ledge on the left side of the road and were gone; so swift and graceful and eerie.  According to the mountain lion entry in Wikipedia, "Adult males may be more than eight feet long (nose to tail), and weigh about 150 pounds (70 kg). In exceptional cases males may reach as much as 200 pounds. Adult females can be 7 ft (2 m) long and weigh about 75 pounds (35 kg)."  I believe it.  These are big, scary predators.

We've always known there are mountain lions in our neighborhood.  My golden retrievers, Denali and Kenai, have brought home complete sets of deer forelegs and assorted other big and nasty dead deer bits that were obviously lion kill.  The dogs are always so proud of themselves that they don't really want to relinquish their trophies to me.  In retrospect, I've been pretty complacent about letting the dogs run around at dusk.  That's definitely over now.  My thinking was that with the two of them, one at 95 pounds and one at 115 pounds, they could look out for each other against a single big cat.  But the "cats" I saw were definitely much larger than the dogs, there were two of them, and they just completely exude the "we're at the top of our food chain" vibe.  I think the only predator I've seen that's even in the same class of scary as the mountain lion is the spotted hyenas I saw in Tanzania.  Part of why hyenas are so scary is they look almost prehistoric with their blunt skulls and pack hunting behavior.  They're just plain ugly.  The mountain lion is elegant and fierce and just plain scary.  No more roaming around freely on our property at dusk for Denali and Kenai.