Here, Kitty, Kitty. Psspsspss.

On the eve of my first day in the park, during a wildlife drive, I lamented the lack of wildlife sightings. All of the park’s communications warn visitors to be prepared for encountering wildlife while hiking. One hundred yards into any trail is this warning sign.The massive 2017 Kenow Fire razed the dense forests, resulting in extensive sightlines. And yet.

Stuck in My Head

I passed by a small gathering of photographers with their big lenses pointed at a black bear high up on a slope. He was too far away, and, honestly, I’m beyond fortunate to be spoiled by previous, intimate bear encounters.

I’d come here to help reset my head. It’d been way too long since I’d been able to wander the wilderness in this way that feeds my soul, and there’s a lot of stress at home. I craved some forest bathing!

Here’s Your Sign

I was having a hard time shedding the stress. “I’ve lost my wildlife mojo,” I said to myself. The wild is responding to my negative energy, I thought as I rounded a bend to see the unmistakable long tail of a mountain lion crossing the road. A wild, North American mountain lion!!

I stopped in the road and activated my flashers while simultaneously grabbing my binoculars. I didn’t expect to locate the ghost cat, master of camouflage, in the low aspens and serviceberry bushes. But there he was. Standing broadside. This magnificent, muscular tomcat looking back at me.

I’ve spent a lot of time in mountain lion territory. I’ve seen tracks, scat, and sign. One delightful winter day, I heard a cougar calling to her kittens. I’m sure plenty of wild cats have seen me. But, until now, I’d never seen one in North America. Ghost cats!

I quickly exchanged the binoculars for my camera. The puma made some assessment of me and turned to pad up the burnt hillside. He moseyed, moving at a relaxed walk, stopping to look around, gently wagging the tip of that long feline tail, doing all the cat things. I reveled in this magical, solitary moment. 

As I watched him disappear and reappear through trees and brush, he crouched below a boulder and scrunched his ears out to the side. The stealthy cat pose. I thought he might be stalking a hare.

It was at this moment that I heard a car approaching. I am stopped in the lane of traffic below a blind curve. I started the car and crept forward with my eyes on the rear-view mirror. In the car behind me, one of the photographers I’d passed activated her flashers, and we both stopped.

I glassed and glassed the hillside but could not find the cougar. The person behind me had their big lens out the window, focused on the slope. I scanned the area where she was looking, astonished that she had found this elusive cat so quickly, when I’d been watching him and can’t find him. Only then do I realize that she’s photographing a black bear higher up the hillside to the left. To the right, a cinnamon-phase black bear is ambling along the hillside toward the other bear. This must be what caught the mountain lion’s attention, causing him to crouch. Bears and cats don’t play well together. I’m sure “my” cat is long gone now.

Still in Awe

When I got home, I checked the time stamps on my images. I spent almost five minutes with this elegant, wild cougar. FIVE MINUTES! A glimpse is a gift. I don’t even know what to call this—unreal, unbelievable, blessed, connection, becoming.

The image of that lion crossing the road when I first saw him is seared in my mind. Today, I’m the luckiest girl in the world.

If you’re interested in purchasing or licensing any images you see here, please email me at SNewenham at exploringnaturephotos.com, and I’ll make it happen.

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The post Ghost Cat Revealed appeared first on Exploring Nature by Sheila Newenham.

She and her two 15-month-old kittens are taking turns feeding on a guanaco kill. When one cat moves off to groom and nap, another moves in.

Petaka is another of Rupestre’s offspring from the same litter as Dania. Female kittens often stay around, sharing overlapping territories with their mother and sisters. Males disperse widely, leaving their relatives behind. This is how nature ensures genetic diversity.

The 15-month-old male was feeding when Petaka returned to eat. They fed together until there was some unseen infraction.

Petaka hissed. The kitten paused. Feeding soon resumed.

Moments later, Petaka cuffed him on the head with her paw. He shrank down low and did not move a muscle for several minutes in deference.

From over the hill out of sight, the sounds of arguing guanacos fill the air. It catches the kitten’s attention. They perk up, heads raised, alert, ears forward. They pause a moment as if to process what’s happening and then slink silently to the top of the hill and disappear from sight.

When Petaka leaves the kill this time, she does not cover it. They are done. She moves off to the right along the ridge, calling, calling, calling for her kids to follow. 

She can see the kittens who are out of my sight, off to the left, and down the ravine. Yet, they don’t respond.

After thirty minutes of persistent calling, she turns back to retrieve them. By the time I get to the edge where I can see them, the greetings – rubbing, head-bunting, purring – are over. I knelt down to watch.

Suddenly, Petaka, trailed by her two grown kittens, began coming right toward me. As she casually closed the distance. I lowered my camera to be fully in this moment. She never held eye contact, but she kept coming, making me wonder if she would brush past me or how this would play out.

At the last moment, she stepped off the trail and walked through our group, with her kittens in tow. All three of them indifferent to our small crowd.

It is the most intimate experience to be accepted and, simultaneously, ignored by wildlife. In their eyes, I’m not good or bad, not something to be sought out or avoided, just another part of their world. As it should be. Human beings are not separate from nature. We are nature.

The family moved to a seasonal stream for a drink, grooming, and a nap. It’s a distinct, lush, green oasis amid the brown landscape of fall.

The caracaras are chattering as they feed at the abandoned carcass. Even though she’s done with it, Petaka cannot help herself and goes back to shoo them off.

She pauses for the iconic “puma in front of the towers” photo. Of course, she does; she’s a superstar.

Then Petaka turns 90° and once again comes right at me. This time, she’s staring me in the eye as she pads toward me. “Nobody move”, the guide softly instructs. She gets to make all the decisions here. The last thing we want to do is startle her or become unpredictable in her mind.

Her posture is relaxed, her eyes soft, her movement fluid. So, despite her eye contact, it’s not unnerving like when a bear looks me in the eye, but it’s decidedly different than the previous encounter.

Again, she steps around us, uttering the softest of churs after she passes by. Oh! My! God!

Our guide, Diego,  jokingly asks to check my pockets for meat. I said, “My friend Jane Goodall told me they sense my spirit.”

“Ah, you come by it honestly, then,” Diego replied. “She smells your heart.” He gestured, inhaling deeply as he drew his hand from his chest towards his nose and outward.

I love that! She smells my heart.

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The post The Puma Petaka appeared first on Exploring Nature by Sheila Newenham.

The warm light of the rising sun casts everything – the grasses, the guanaco, the puma – in the same golden glow. I know there’s a lion on the hillside 50 yards away. A guide with two guests are watching her as I arrive. I’m looking where their cameras are pointed. I can’t see her. The moment she stands, the motion catches my eye. She’s half-heartedly stalking a few guanaco that are grazing over the next hill. If it might be easy, why not give it a try?

They know she’s there. She turns back, stretches, and scrapes the ground (marking behavior) before returning to the last remains of a kill she’d been feeding on.

I sit down to watch as she casually pulls the carcass. Her ease reveals her strength.

Her shoulder muscles ripple as she grabs a leg and deftly pulls the entire carcass off the ground. My guide knows through the puma trackers that this kill is three days old. “They’re done with it.” Ginger, the cat in front of us now, is probably scavenging it. Dania, Ginger’s sister, likely made the kill.

Ginger moves off over the left side of a hill as the caracaras move in. We walk along the right side of the hill out of sight. She’s moving faster than we are, so as we get to the back of the hill, she’s rounded the backside and crosses just yards in front of us, never even glancing our way. This is the magic of the Chilean Patagonia pumas.

A Little History

The lands around Torres del Paine National Park had long been working sheep ranches (estancias). In 1995, a severe winter storm, dubbed The White Earthquake, devastated these farms. Six feet of snow and subzero temperatures resulted in the loss of 176,000 sheep. Many ranchers quit and sold their land instead of rebuilding. The owners of this estancia stayed on their land but didn’t replace their livestock. The “unused” twenty-three square miles of their land reverted to grassland. Guanacos and rheas returned to graze on their native land. And the pumas followed.

As puma sightings became more common, our guide approached the estancia’s owners, paying them to use their land to track and film pumas. The estancia now devotes all its efforts to puma conservation and tourism. On this land that used to see sheep ranchers actively hunt pumas (despite puma hunting being illegal in all of Chile), the densest population of pumas on the planet now exists. It is estimated that twenty pumas currently use parts of this land.

Habituation of Generations of Wild Cats

Rupestre is the Queen of Torres del Paine. She is a mountain lion made famous as the star of BBC’s Dynasties II with David Attenborough and Netflix’s Predators (among others). These film crews followed Rupestre for two years as she raised four cubs (one of which is Dania) to independence and ended the following spring when she gave birth to another four cubs (one of which is Ginger).

Dania and her littermate, Petaka, both have two cubs with them this year, who are growing up amid their own paparazzi on these same lands. The people and cameras are simply a benign part of the landscape of no consequence to the cats. This allows us to watch them living their lives without help or harm from us.

Dania

Ginger sauntered off into the park. We are not allowed to follow her. Claudio, our lion tracker, has spied one better. It’s Dania and her two four-month-old cubs. They are resting over a small hill, barely visible. We wait.

A lot of this trip is spent watching cats sleep. My phone is full of pictures of my own cats sleeping. Every time they stretch or tuck their head, I think, “Oh! He’s so cute!” and snap another picture.

It’s clear to me that the others in my group (despite having pet cats at home) don’t have phones full of cat pictures because they are otherwise occupying themselves, waiting for the cats to stir.

Cats are nothing if not patient; the way they sit perfectly still for upwards of an hour waiting for just the right moment to move while hunting.

Accordingly, our patience pays off. The family of three gets up, enjoys post-nap greetings, and walks along a ridge in front of a distant blue mountain.

The kittens play. Dania tries to get them to come with her and eventually gives up and lies back down in a patch of tall green grass.

The kittens stalk and pounce on each other. Then they disappear in the tall grass, too.

We take a midday break, returning in the late afternoon. A flick of an ear and a cat stretch reveal the family to be just where we’d left them. They don’t get up before sunset ushers us away.

“It’s a farting day”, guide Diego Arroyo explains. Their stomachs are full, they’re digesting, and are rarely active in the one to two days after leaving a kill. If an easy opportunity were to present itself, Dania would hunt, but she won’t seek out an opportunity and put in the hard work of stalking and chasing for another 7-10 days. Her hunger has to build enough to stir her motivation into action.

What will tomorrow bring?

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The post Pumas of Patagonia appeared first on Exploring Nature by Sheila Newenham.

Iconic Patagonia

Patagonia is known for its dramatic granite towers jutting up from the steppe, reflecting in quiet lakes. Since the last century, it has been a backpackers’ dream destination. There is beauty in every direction. This March, I traveled to Torres del Paine National Park at the end of the Earth along an eastern spur of the Andes Mountains.

Getting There

The first leg of the trip took me three hours from my home airport to Los Angeles. From Los Angeles, I took a ten-and-a-half-hour red-eye to Santiago, Chile. After a layover there, I boarded the last plane to fly another three hours south to Puerto Natales, Chile. (Chile is a loooooong country!). The last bit was just a forty-minute ride to the hotel. Twenty hours after I left my house in North Idaho, I am 7325 miles away on the tip of the Southern Hemisphere. I’m running on adrenaline.From everywhere we went over the next six days, I could see the Paine Massif and its iconic trio of towers. Rising almost 10,000 feet from the grassland, they are separated from the mountain range and glaciers, so you can drive (or hike) around them. It’s hard to wrap my head around that topography. There aren’t many places in the world where such grand mountains rise from sea level. For context, the distance from Mt. Everest’s base camp to the summit is “only” 11,430 feet. (Of course, you start at 17,600 feet and need supplemental oxygen).

Promises of what we’ll see in this dramatic landscape.

Except that the ostriches are rheas, the llamas are guanaco, and the armadillo is a hairy armadillo. Our guide was slightly annoyed that the caution signs didn’t depict his South American animals: “None of them are our species except the lion!”

Salty Lakes

Many lakes in and around Torres del Paine National Park are closed systems, fed only by rainwater with no inlet or outlet. This situation allows salt accumulation, resulting in alkaline water. In this unique high pH environment, bacteria precipitate calcium, trapping sediment in layers.

Over thousands of years, white rocks resembling coral, called stromatolites, formed. Stromatolites are some of the oldest living organisms on Earth. The photosynthesis by the bacteria within these “rocks” helped to create our atmosphere 3.5 million years ago. The unique environment required for their formation exists in only a few places worldwide. It’s these salty waters that attract the unexpected Chilean flamingo.

Bones and Scavengers

The only significant scavengers on the Patagonian steppe are raptors who pick the carcasses clean. In the absence of mammal scavengers like hyenas, who eat bones, or canids, who chew and relocate bones, bleached, weathered bits of skeletons accumulate on the landscape. Grasses grow through them, and they develop a beautiful patina.

Andean condors, one of the largest flighted birds in the world, soar on ten-foot wingspans to spy carrion from afar.

Southern crested caracaras, white-throated caracaras, and chimanga caracaras are falcons that both hunt and scavenge the grasslands. The crested caracaras always look like gangsters to me.

Two pairs of black-chested buzzard-eagles engage in aerial territorial displays south of the park. They are squat, stocky hawks (despite buzzard and eagle in their common name, they are neither). They feed primarily on invasive European hares and rabbits.Other birds I’d never seen before…

Guanaco 

These camelid species, related to llamas, are the most common wild animals in the area. As prey animals, they are always on alert with a quizzical face, a soft, bi-lobed prehensile nose/muzzle, and enviable eyelashes framing large, soft, dark eyes.

Their woolly coats have long outer hairs that form a skirt along their comically narrow waists. On their long legs and soft hooves, they can run up to forty miles/hour. These are the puma’s primary prey. Weighing 175-250 pounds, it’s an amazing feat for a 110-pound female lion to bring one down to feed her family.The sheep pastures are fenced to keep the sheep in. Adult guanacos can easily jump these fences. Their calves, called chulengos, cannot. Along the roadways near the small towns, chulengos congregate at the fences.

Their mothers will come back for them, but the chulengos are distressed, pacing the fence lines. Sometimes, pumas will use the fences as a hunting strategy. However, pumas are not tolerated by sheep ranchers. Hunting is illegal, so livestock guardian dogs are used to haze the big cats away.

Pumas

Patagonia pumas have been the stars of films like the recent BBC’s Seven Worlds, One Planet (episode three), and Dynasties, Netflix’s Predator series, and Our Great National Parks. The films document the dramatic lives of females raising cubs. Every film crew following a habituated mountain lion produces kittens growing up with filmmakers as part of their typical scenery. In 1995, it took a National Geographic filmmaker two years to earn the trust of a puma to make his film Puma: Lion of the Andes. Now, anyone with the resources can sit among these regal cats without disturbing them as they go about their daily lives. What a privilege to be accepted as part of nature and watch these cats being cats.

Next up: all about pumas!

Puma: from the Quechua language for “powerful one”

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The post Chilean Patagonia appeared first on Exploring Nature by Sheila Newenham.

-Miguel Ordenana

In 2012, a biologist’s camera trap in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park caught an unexpected sight. A mountain lion! Griffith Park is akin to Central Park in New York, but a bit more wild. No one expected it could be wild enough to be home to a mountain lion for TEN years.

Male mountain lions leave their natal home ranges at about two years of age to seek their own territories. They can roam a great distance in their search (one exceptional lion walked 1500 miles from South Dakota to Connecticut). It’s nature’s way of preventing inbreeding. P-22 is the first in recent times to successfully cross the 405’s twelve lanes of traffic and Highway 101’s ten lanes of traffic to migrate from the Santa Monica mountains into L.A. Other cats have tried only to be struck and killed on the roadways.

No one thought he would stay. The biologists clung to every camera trap sighting, fearing it might be the last they’d see of him. Yet, he stayed. He arrived as a two-year-old and coexisted peacefully among people and pets in a park that is just eight square miles. That is less than one-tenth the size of an average male mountain lion’s 100-150 square mile range. He was initially captured and collared in 2012 as the 22nd puma collared by the National Park Service, thus dubbed P-22.

P-22 lived among horseback riders, joggers, dog walkers, athletic fields, a renowned Observatory, and the L.A. Zoo with only a rare direct sighting. Until he fell ill at twelve years old, his only transgression was likely a koala at the zoo. P-22 is the prime suspect in the koala’s disappearance.

In December 2022, wildlife officials decided to capture P-22 for a full assessment after he had begun wandering into residential neighborhoods and preying on pets. This atypical behavior was alarming, and officials were concerned he might be ill. At twelve, he’s an old lion. A full veterinary exam, blood tests, ultrasound and CT imaging revealed that he had recently been hit by a car. He had damage to one eye and a diaphragmatic hernia (blunt force can cause a hole in the diaphragm allowing the intestines into the chest). He also had liver and kidney disease. It was all too much. He would require surgery to repair the hole in his diaphragm, but he would still be hampered by organ failures that, under the best of circumstances, would prevent him from being re-released. P-22’s team of veterinarians from the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Park made the unanimous, heart-wrenching recommendation for euthanasia. P-22 was so loved in the Los Angeles area that tickets to his Celebration of Life Memorial crashed Ticketmaster and sold out in a matter of hours. The February 4, 2023 event will be live-streamed for all those who can’t attend (details are not yet available).

Miguel Ordenana, the biologist whose camera trap first caught P-22, and members of several local Native tribes brought P-22’s remains to the Los Angeles Nature History Museum. Upon arrival, the Tribal representatives led a blessing ceremony welcoming P-22 back to his homeland where he can be visited by those whose lives he touched and continue to be an ambassador for all wildlife. 

P-22 is the world’s most famous mountain lion. He is an ambassador for the species and wildlife living among people. It’s amazing what tolerance, understanding, and coexistence can bring! Here are some resources about P-22 and how you can help mountain lions to thrive peacefully among us.

When Mountain Lions are Neighbors: People and wildlife working it out in California by Beth Pratt-Bergstrom (book)

P-22: The Life & Death of an L.A. Cougar with Miguel Ordeñana & Beth Pratt (podcast)

https://cougarfund.org

/https://mountainlion.org

/https://panthera.org

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The post P-22: The World’s Most Famous Mountain Lion appeared first on Exploring Nature by Sheila Newenham.