JH Underground – Jackson Hole, Wyoming news, sports and music blog from Jackson Hole, Wyoming

For two weeks I had been driving around with bags of bottles and cans in my car, left behind by friends I had dropped at the airport.

Having grown weary of the smell of stale beer, I finally pulled into the recycling center last Wednesday to unload these and other recyclables. Beyond the south end of the building I spotted a small crowd with tripods.

Must be a mountain lion, I figured, or a wolf.

That afternoon, workers on break had spotted a cougar from the center’s loading dock. The cat had killed a buck mule deer about 300 yards up the hillside, near the mouth of Adams Canyon. It was a large mountain lion, sex undetermined.

Word spread to local wildlife aficionados and representatives of the Cougar Fund, the Jackson-based nonprofit dedicated to preserving the great cats.

Among the observers that evening was Sue Cedarholm, friend and assistant of Cougar Fund founder Tom Mangelsen. Sue let me have a look through her camera and Tom’s 600mm lens.

It was close to sunset, and the cat was lying down behind the carcass, barely visible. Still, it was reassuring to know this magical creature existed, just beyond the edge of the world of humans, apparently content.

This marked the second straight February I had seen a mountain lion on the outskirts of town. Last year, I was fortunate to spot a cougar on a butte in the National Elk Refuge — the first such sighting of my life.

This time was more pedestrian. As the cat lay down for a nap, I tossed bottles into the dumpsters with a crash.

All day, I was told, the lion paid no heed to the traffic racing past on Highway 89, nor the rumbling semi trucks that hauled away loads from the recycling center.

If only every day could be so placid for these cats. As word leaked of the cougar’s presence, hunters fanned out in the surrounding canyons — Cache Creek, Game Creek — with sleds and dogs, hungry to put a trophy on their walls.

Just beyond the ridge where the lion was denning is Hunt Area 29, where up to 13 cougars — nine male and four female — can be killed each season, an astonishing number given the rarity of the species. Four already had been killed this year.

The cat lingered on the hillside behind the recycling center for several days, affording dozens of people a look through spotting scopes and binoculars.

Sara Carlson of the Cougar Fund reported today that the lion was gone. Given the hunters lying in wait, she suspected, it was “good as dead.”

You might recall that last winter’s wondrous mountain lion sighting ended up badly, with the cat visiting an east Jackson neighborhood and being relocated by Wyoming Game and Fish to a remote canyon where it eventually starved.

I felt like recycling my friends’ beer bottles had brought me good karma in spotting the cat. It’s a shame these predators receive no such luck when venturing near the world of humans.

Here’s hoping the cat made a clean getaway to the wilds of the Gros Ventres.

•

I don’t know what it is about broken glass and the smell of stale beer, but the recycling center seems to be a magnet for wildlife.

On my last visit to the Adams Canyon site south of town, in January, I came across this rough-legged hawk unfazed by industry and the whirr of Subarus and pickups.

Thanks to birding sage Bert Raynes for the identification.

Posted under environment, mountain lions, recycling, wildlife