NEWS
About that Mountain Lion Video … By Kimberly Wear kim@northcoastjournal.com
A mountain lion, like this one, was protecting her cubs, not stalking a runner who came along the family in Provo, Utah. California Department of Fish and Wildlife/File
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hances are most people have seen — or at least heard about — the now viral video of a Utah man who went out for a run in a Provo canyon on Oct. 10 and ended up face to face with a very angry mama mountain lion. For six tense and profanity-laced minutes, Kyle Burgess kept filming with his cellphone as he backed away from the cougar, sometimes cussing and other times telling her she needed to go back to her babies, which he had inadvertently stumbled upon on a trail, at first mistaking the cubs for bobcat kittens. “I don’t feel like dying today,” Burgess says at one point in the video posted to his Instagram account.
(Spoiler alert: He was shaken up but otherwise fine, and had to traverse the same area of the encounter to get back to his car, according to an interview in the Deseret News, but did so this time while carrying a rock and a stick.) While certainly scary, several wildlife experts who have commented on the chance meeting share the assessment of Humboldt County conservationist and California State Parks guide John “Griff ” Griffith, who described the mountain lion’s actions as a mother protecting her young. “I know a little something about mountain lions,” he says, in a recent Facebook video while taking many a media outlet to task for labeling her behavior as “stalking” in a riff that skirts the conspiracy the-
ory line. “That was not a mountain lion stalking. That was a mama mountain lion trying to get someone away from her cubs. There is a difference.” Along similar lines, Beth Schaefer, director of animal programs at the Los Angeles Zoo, described the cougar’s response as “escorting behavior” to the Los Angeles Times. In other words, the mountain lion was making it clear to an unwelcomed visitor in her territory that it was time to get (we can only imagine she would have added a certain expletive here) out. Schaefer noted the sudden pounces that caused many who watched the video to jump were actually what’s known in the animal world as bluff charges, which cats
like a mountain lion don’t use if they are about to take down prey. The truly scary part, Schaefer tells the Times, is when the mother lion disappears off-screen — which is more along the lines of a hunt — before quickly returning to the path. Those who watch it might also note she repeatedly keeps looking back in the direction of her cubs. The Mountain Lion Foundation, a Sacramento-based nonprofit dedicated to the animal’s preservation, put out a plea soon after the video went viral asking individuals and the media to be careful in how they described the encounter when sharing the story. Continued on page 13 »
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