Is There a Lion in Your Backyard?

 

Before you answer that, you better go to the window and look. They HAVE been showing up around here in peoples' backyards lately, whether yours or not.

I was put to thinking about backyard lions recently at the conclusion of a delivery I gave to the Sunset Rotary Club which holds meetings at the Tulsa Boys' Home. The topic requested for my attention was hunting and fishing opportunities along the wild Arkansas River, which, in case you haven't noticed, is getting wilder by the day. Well, sorta'. 

I'm getting too old for curveballs, and was relieved to see a slow "fat one" headed my way. I felt I handled the requested topic well. I know a little about the hunting and fishing around here until I got to the Q&A session at the end. Jim Eardley, longtime resident of Prattville, wanted to know what was the closest I had ever been to a mountain lion. Well, he had me there. In all of my rambles I have been places wild, hundreds of miles from the nearest road, places where I knew I was practically surrounded by mountain lions, and I have never seen a single one. Mountain lions are primarily nocturnal creatures, and it's the rare sighting, indeed, that occurs in broad daylight. 

Having said that, I HAVE seen dozens of grizzly bears, animals that few will ever see outside of a zoo or national park setting, where I have reached my finger down to a rifle's trigger guard just to make sure there was still a rifle down there. But I have never seen a mountain lion in the wild, and I told Jim that. 

Jim knows people that have. Jim works in the asphalt business. His work takes him into both urban and rural neighborhoods all over this part of the state. 

Recently, he was laying a driveway in the Rolling Oaks area when a lady showed him a picture of a mountain lion she took ten years ago as it watered in her backyard goldfish pond, hence the question in the very first sentence of this article. When he told me that, I had to admit that she has been a lot closer to a lion than I have. Well, so far as I know. Every deer hunter hears things on his way to the deer stand in the dark that make him wonder, so who can say? Some of us may have been closer to one than we realize. 

Another one of Jim's rural customers, a woman that lives just off the junction of I-44 and State Highway 33, told him she had seen a lion several times in her front yard, and after a snowfall last year found its tracks along her driveway causing her to "hurry like all get out into my house!" The thing that particularly interested me about that report is that it kind of jibes with several that I have received in the last several years about a lion being seen frequently in the general area south of Mannford City Lake and in the Highway 33/48 area. 

Gregg Conway, Tulsa Boys' Home director, added to Eardley's comments by chiming in that he had seen one on Boys' Home property just west of Sand Springs. One was captured in somebody's backyard in North Tulsa last summer, remember? Yet another was run over by a car south of Oklahoma City near Minco located on State Highway 81 this past autumn. Another was photographed on a deer hunter's trail camera north of Sand Springs last summer as well. The Leader ran the picture then, and the same picture accompanies this piece. 

So, apparently everybody has seen a mountain lion around here at one time or another (maybe you, too) except me. I have done extensive reading on the phantom creatures. 

A few years back, I read a report generated by the Montana fish and game people that indicated their study of numerous radio-collared lions in their area indicate that they will eat, on average, one deer a week during the course of a healthy lifetime. They cannot make it on rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks. A normal range of territory without outside interference will encompass about a fifty mile square area. They like to lie up during daylight hours in terrain that features plenty of rocky ledges which they use to scan surrounding habitat for potential meals. They are expert at executing short distance ambushes from the downwind side of the intended prey. They are successful at gathering a dinner roughly one chance out of ten. 

What our apparent abundance of mountain lions really tells us is that we have an abundance of deer, don't you think? Think about that a moment: One deer a week. Wouldn't that be fifty-two a year? That's a lot of deer meat, and that's what the studies indicate they have to have, and that's what we do have. 

I haven't seen the lions, but I see the things they eat all over the place. Which brings me to my conclusion and the question you have been dying to ask. Do mountain lions eat people? Yes, but hardly ever. If one eats you, you will not remember it.

© 2012 Conrad M. Vollertsen