An SUV hit a mountain lion in Connecticut yesterday:
DEP reps claim it walked from
South Dakota. They generally go about 100 miles in a lifetime to find a mate. This one must have heard about older women in New Haven and gotten confused.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/27/nyregion/wild-cougar-traveled-east-1500-miles-tests-find.html
Note the confused DNA status. Was it part of a group of m. lions found in S. Dakota, or what? Is it not "confirmation bias" to argue that it had to have walked from S. Dakota, simply because it's not conceivable that it could have been living in Connecticut?
I drove through Connecticut two weeks back and it's pretty built-up, but between Hartford and New Haven for example on Route 8 it was all forest on both sides of the highway (a distance of about fifty miles).
I think the DEP could be lying to avoid hysteria surrounding the reintroduction of mountain lions into the northeast. The mountains I live in are called the Catskills, because these woods were their native habitat for millenia. The DEP tells us they have been gone since about 1840. With all the hoopla surrounding nativism and animal rights many people seem to be on the side of the mountain lions. A mountain lion can kill a full-grown adult in three seconds or less.
And there are many sightings. I myself have seen bobcats and coyotes (coyotes are similar to wolves, but smaller and not as deadly -- the only human adult a coyote has killed in North America was a Canadian folk singer -- but folk singers are not exactly the Canadians most skilled in self-defense).
Coyotes are rampant in this area. In winter they yip at daybreak and drown out the town clock. Last night I saw one walking down the road as if it was a citizen, about as afraid to walk the street as I am. Seeing them suspends time it's so weird. It had a small dead black kitten in its barbaric mouth. We tried to chase it with the car. My kindergartner said, "Dad, it has pink ears!"
The ears were transparent in the headlights as it jogged indignantly down into the woods that line the highway where it presumably has its burro. It then shared the neighbor's kitty (I saw the pink ribbon around its neck, but I think it was already dead as it didn't struggle) with its infernal kits.
27 comments:
The last time I saw a coyote was at Death Valley Dunes. The dunes are very peculiar--you can come upon an animal in a small depression, hidden from view. The sand tends to soften one's footfall, so these accidents can occur without warning.
I've never encountered a wild cat. I've encountered wild boar--very kinky critters--skunks, rattlesnakes, and moose--but never a wild feline. They're elusive. Hear wolves in the night. We even were visited once many years ago in our lakeside camp by a marauding bear, who snuffed and chuffed at the perimeter of our campfire before ambling off.
Meeting a wild creature in the woods can make your hair stand up. Which explains the aversion with which they were mythologized by our ancestors.
travellin up the freeway from pasadena to lancaster one night
i watched a big cat edge out onto the road over the gaurd rail
he didn't see the big ole oversize tire california freedom pickup truck haulin ass behind me
i passed the cat and watched in my rearview
the huge truck hauled ass right into the thing didn't even try to miss it aimed at i would guess
anyway i watched the thing tumble under the truck and i pulled over
and saw it lying there on the hiway
and realized there wasn't a damned thing i could do
but i felt for the cat
more than for the dude in the truck
cats in the wild do possess a certain nobility - the big ones do
i consider all cats
wild
cats kill
jh
I don't like wild nature very much, as everything out there is trying to kill everything else. I do like parks. This area is kind of both -- we have the Catskill Park area which is somewhat wild (not many trails), and we have huge set asides of wilderness for the NYC water department (about a third of the county). All kinds of stuff crawling around out there. Nature has no politesse. It's kill or be killed. No political correctness for animals whatsoever, no protectionism for the weaker animals. They have to hide, or else get eaten.
I think the place for mountain lions now is zoos. They belong in zoos.
They are like big criminals that are beyond any kind of remorse for what they do to other animals. They're just big dangerous criminals that can't learn the ten commandments.
Completely unrepentant. I understand that there is a grace in these killing machines, but it's not the kind of grace that I would like to see in people.
Animals are people, too, and if they can't act like people, they belong in zoos.
Some people, of course, act like animals, and those people belong in prisons.
man
a rational animal
with irrational tendencies
like political presumption
mating is a basic irrational animal act one we share with all healthy animals
of course most animals recognize it for what it is
the penitential life is the life for me
everyone else is free frightening and free
i wonder if i could walk to connecticutt without being noticed
jh
here kitty kitty
Where the cat was hit is about five miles west of New Haven in a town called Millford (there must have been a mill and a ford there). What was it doing there?
They are probably all over Connecticut, but then again, it could be an anomaly. How does anybody know?
I think that the issue is so closed that it's almost like global warming. But I can't understand why the paradigm is so closed on mountain lion omnipresence. Who gains?
Some think it's due to the DEP reintroducing them, but not wanting to create hysteria.
I can't understand why the DEP has a whole office devoted to mosquito eradication in CT but yet would want to introduce mountain lions.
Unless someone has bats in their belfry.
It's really hard to understand this phenomenon, especially hard to understand why no one will consider that there are native groups of mountain lions that have lasted from the 19th century until now.
There are probably more scientists working to find a Sasquatch than there are trying to prove that mountain lions actually exist in the Northeast corridor.
At least on the History channel all they seem to air some weeks is Sasquatch shows. The "scientists" on the show do have laboratories available to them and do work in universities, but also interview native Americans and hunters who claim to have seen the oversized critters.
I want everything to exist including life on other planets, and in other dimensions. The universe is a little less lonely that way.
I just hope that Sasquatch and mountain lions are not communist voters. I also hope the population of other galaxies are not communists. I hope they are Hamiltonian liberals with a deep interest in Locke.
Kirby, I think you lack an essential comprehension of the science of ecology.
Unless, of course, you're merely mugging again, in order to generate disagreement and fuss.
Apex predators are crucial markers for the health of an ecosystem.
Humans took only about three centuries to over-run the North American continent, which has had devastating consequences for wild-life, and the balance of the constituent parts of the landscape. We've killed off dozens of species, or driven them out, and have destroyed much of the landscape with over-crowding, over-exploitation, over-hunting, soil exhaustion, sucking out the aquifers, etc., etc.. The riparian vegetation and indigenous fauna which occupied pre-Columbian America had subsisted here for hundreds of thousands of years (at least).
Wildness as a principle or quality of existence developed over millennia. It manifests an efficiency which enabled natural selection to perfect the relationship between potential and use. Man has forever disturbed these fragile relationships. Devastation lies everywhere. Most large American cities today are wastelands of sterility and ugliness. And we've laid waste to much of the continent.
I find it ironic that the article you reference today addresses--albeit obliquely--"ecological" issues. Your political proclivities would put you squarely against preservation and the values of wilderness.
Maybe there's hope for you yet. Start with one tree, and extrapolate to larger precincts.
I haven't read the whole article yet, but will do so (I've registered).
It's erroneous to think that Republicans are not conservative with regard to conservation. Bush put aside tremendous areas for conservation. Lincoln, a Republican, was among the first to consider the National Parks. Olmsted was a Republican.
Many in the left see only the Republicans they hate as Republicans and use them as a metonym for all Republicans. Many see Nixon for instance as the only Republican, and draw inferences from Nixon about all Republicans. But even the Nixon they see is not the real Nixon. The Real Nixon had a far more complex character than the caricature to which they subscribe.
Republicans are very involved in conservation efforts. Marianne Moore was a Republican.
Jack Kerouac was a Republican.
The Republican party has a very complex heritage. It's difficult if you have a black and white set of paradigms and think that Democrat equals good and Republican equals bad.
At any rate, thank you for registering. Also, if you have time, read the symposium by various literary critics on the notion of the Pastoral. That's quite fascinating!
I think, on the contrary, that Republicans have gotten away from their core principles over the last three decades.
Republicans were once regarded as fiscally cautious, except with respect to defense spending. Even there, they were often skeptical of newfangled hardware and advanced technological gadgets.
The Republicans have become opportunists, seizing the initiative only when their opponents seem vulnerable on some inflammatory issue, such as abortion, gay marriage, inheritance taxes, or resentment against "elites."
The real issues, as always, are where big money has placed its bets, and what lengths it has gone to to control political outcomes. Big oil, big energy, big finance--these are the movers and shakers of our age, facilitated by the armies of lobbyists and organized pressure groups financed by present-day robber-barons. At a time when petroleum corporations are making record-braking profits, our Congress approves "tax holidays" for them.
Meanwhile, Republicans carp about benefit "entitlements." It's obscene.
I spent the last week in and around Rocky Mountain National Park. The last time I saw a coyote was Saturday ;-). We saw elk on most days, not only in the park, but even outside the Safeway in Estes Park yesterday afternoon; and bighorn sheep a couple of days.
I've been told that native wolf populations that were re-introduced at Yellowstone have been diffusing through the mountains, and are expected to make it to RMNP in a few years.
I've run into black bears out in nature -- with a canoe on my shoulders, no less, but that was many years ago. But I've never encountered a big cat in the wild. They are, and always have been, rare.
RMNP isn't a polite eastern park. If you want to climb Longs Peak, go ahead. Hundreds, if not thousands, do every year. And most years, a few die. If you want to head out into back country, you need a permit; common sense and proper preparation are optional, and even that's not always sufficient. But for those who seek open spaces, and a physical and psychological challenge, the rewards exceed the risks.
Curtis, maybe it would help clarify some of your comments if you named a specific Republican and then named a specific statement from a specific speech on a specific date in a specific controversy. I can't recognize your broadsweep generalities as coming from any specific people in specific times. I'd like to check up on these statements and see for myself.
How big are "green issues" in the economy now? I know that Obama had a green czar named Van Jones who was fired because Glenn Beck discovered his Maoist affiliations (google if you like).
How much money is going into green initiatives? BO promised it was going to be a lot, but I don't know what came of it. He also hinted that he was going to simplify the regulations imposed on ocean-run salmon, but maybe that was just a joke without a punchline. I don't know.
It's very time-consuming to track these things. Obama speaks in giant foggy generalities, so I rarely have any sense at all what he's saying. I think he likes it that way.
I have a Democratic friend from childhood who called last night to tell me he thought that Obama was actually a violent Republican. He was bitterly disappointed that the rich get to keep private jets when he has to wait in first class for his plane to take off and on. It's so bitter to sit there with wine and cocktails amidst all the people passing out their gold-plated cards to one another, while others just line up on the runway and away they go.
How many people really have private jets in this country? What are the actual fees that the Democrats wish to impose on them?
I've heard BO mumble about private jets (his belongs to the US and is a pretty good one, I understand). But is this some kind of metonym without reality? How do you check this kind of thing?
The whole global warming hoax is something that keeps millions of scientists employed.
A few speak up and lose their jobs if they do.
Honestly, I have no idea what's going on. There's a fact that a man in an SUV hit a mountain lion. Well, I'm not even sure it was a man. They never released the driver's name, did they?
What it was doing five miles from New Haven is anybody's guess.
It could be a fraternity prank from the Skulls and Bones folks.
We have vast frameworks of understanding, and relatively few hard facts.
Concepts without data don't mean much.
Data without concepts don't mean much.
I did go through Lyme, CT a few weeks ago and meant to post a photo of me standing next to their town sign. Glad I didn't linger there. I might have been jumped by a cougar.
Or killed by global warming.
Or a Seagram's bottle might have been thrown out of a private jet and cracked my head in half.
You never know. My main worry at the time was Lyme ticks. I tried to stand there long enough in the high grass to see if one would crawl up my leg with lethal thoughts.
None did. But last week in the Poconos, I really did have a Lyme tick on my leg. Ticket to perdition! I ran screaming and jumped in my brother's arms.
The elk in Estes Park have long been a problem - They're basically large rats overrunning the town, since all of their natural predators have died off. (would be good if the wolfs came back to kill 'em off a bit.)
Last year the gvmt. started (mostly quietly) thinning the herd, so that's good - but they're still over-populated. if you want to see tons of 'em, check out the golf courses in September and October. They're cool-looking, but they're a nuisance.
Just tell me you weren't one of those tourists who stopped in the middle of the road to take pictures... It's a ROAD, not a ZOO, people!!! Some of us have places to go!
I've actually been in Estes for a few days - my grandpa, who's lived here for decades, just passed away, and this is where my camp is, so I'll be partayin' down with the counselor kids when they get their freedom in a week...
I don't know if I could have handled running into Stu at the grocery store...Woulda blown my mind.
Brett,
Just tell me you weren't one of those tourists who stopped in the middle of the road to take pictures... It's a ROAD, not a ZOO, people!!! Some of us have places to go!
You'll be glad to know that we didn't stop in the road. I got good shots from a moving truck at one place (my son-in-law was driving), and at another point we pulled into a parking lot, and walked a bit to get a decent shot. The easiest shot, though, was from the balcony of my hotel room, filled the frame at 200mm.
I don't know if I could have handled running into Stu at the grocery store...Woulda blown my mind.
Woulda been cool, if you ask me. As well as mind-blowing. I wish I'd known you were there. I'd have loved to go out for a beer or three.
Visited Estes Park fifty years ago when I was about six years old and again six years ago when my brother-in-law and his longtime girlfriend decided they wanted to get married on horseback at a dude ranch in Fairplay. Rode the same tram up to the top of the little peak that overlooks Estes Park. It was dejavu all over again.
Only animals we saw in the national park were those bighorn sheep, the one's with the headgear that made me a Rams fan.
It's important to think about the administrative side of nature. Estes Park is a PARK. It has an administration. Brett says they are QUIETLY taking out the elk. This is because no one wants to think about the administration of nature.
However, there is probably NO PART of nature that is now outside of any administration.
I also loved Dim Lamp's comment about restaurants vs. parks, and can only comment that I loved his comment. It was a very keen insight.
I often drive around still thinking of the "scribble" that appeared on his blog, and how adept he was in creating a vital zone of peace in my mind with that drawing.
Kirby,
It's important to think about the administrative side of nature. Estes Park is a PARK.
Nope. Estes Park is a city.
Brett says they are QUIETLY taking out the elk. This is because no one wants to think about the administration of nature.
This is at Rocky Mountain National Park, next door, so to speak. Maintaining proper herd size (subject to some definition of "proper") is what hunting licenses are all about. The "quietly" part has to do with the sense that hunting in a national park ought not be permitted.
I also loved Dim Lamp's comment about restaurants vs. parks, and can only comment that I loved his comment. It was a very keen insight.
Yes, but like all generalizations, it's possible to find counterexamples. The restaurant at the visitor center on Trail Ridge Road in RMNP is run by the Park Service. The menu was limited, but the food was nutrious, tasty, and very fairly priced. Put a concession there, and you'd pay twice as much for food that's half as good, with the difference going to the entrepreneur.
I'm not sure why the Trail Ridge Cafe beats the odds. At a guess, it's managers (in this case, governmental managers) who really care about the experience, and who want people who visit to have a positive impression of the park as a whole.
And I've been to some truly terrible private restaurants, usually but not always badly run franchises of a generally successful chain.
Estes Park is a city?
I thought it must be some kind of park or a nature park.
I'm thinking even National Parks, which seem like "nature" really aren't. They are parks. That is, they have been set aside to "be" nature. Which means they are kinda wild. But only because we allow it, and have voted it in. Otherwise, we'd trash'em with condos and ice cream stands.
Does Estes Park have parks?
Why is it called a park, if it's a city? I find this funny.
Do we have any parks that we call cities?
I was trying to find counterexamples to Dim Lamp's generalization and was thinking about chains in terms of automobile repair. I once had to pull into a repair shop that was part of a huge chain called Pep Boys. The next day I came in and they charged me 27 cents for some tube.
I couldn't believe it.
They said the chain had very strict standards and wouldn't allow them to cheat.
I think if I had gone to any mom and pop automobile repair it would have been at least 50 dollars. Probably 300.
Perhaps there's a lot more variation among mom and pop restaurants.
I love the whole problem of standards. They can be good, but limiting. They can limit the quality, but also the ultimate price.
I don't know of any really rotten parks. I'm sure they exist, but I love parks.
I didn't realize there was such a thing as a private park. 300 years ago all parks were private parks. But now I thought they were all public parks. There's one very tiny park left in NYC that is private. It's open one day a year to the public on May 1st, or at least in the first week of May, perhaps as a nod to workers' day.
There must be many private parks left around the world. Are these parks that you pay to enter?
Or that just keep you out? If they keep you out, I don't know how anyone would evaluate them.
I was trying to think about what private parks Dim Lamp had in mind when he made his quip.
Kirby,
Does Estes Park have parks?
Don't know, but it seems kind of redundant, given where it's cited.
Why is it called a park, if it's a city? I find this funny.
Do we have any parks that we call cities?
This is sort of a "why do we drive on the parkway, but park on the driveway?" sort of question. Undoubtedly it was called Estes Park as advertising, an inducement to encourage folks to buy land, build homes and businesses, and expand the economy of the town. It's hardly unprecedented.
Estes Park has 5,858 inhabitants. I don't think this is big enough to call it a city. Wikipedia called it a town. I might downgrade it to a village.
My town (Delhi, NY) has about 5000 people but is called a village.
No one would call it a city. It has three streets: Elm (there are no longer any elm on that street, but it hasn't been changed to Maple), Main (this is still the main street), and Second (I'm not sure if it actually came second, or if it came in third, but not knowing for sure, I'll guess that it was probably second in terms of its creation).
In addition to public and private parks where nature is the greatest attraction, we should also add amusement parks. There, amusement is the greatest attraction.
Water parks would be a subsidiary of that grouping.
I'm kind of amused by the nomenclature surrounding parks and cities named after parks. Stu kicked this off.
I haven't been able to find a rationale behind the naming of Estes Park. Who named it. What did they have in mind?
MenloPark in California is a town of about 32,000. It was originally named by two settlers who lived there in the 1800s. They called it that, and the name stuck.
Here is alist of City Parks in NYC, that fall under three government agencies (state, federal and city) plus there is one private park called Gramercy (you have to live on the square surrounding it to get a key).
There is also Park City, UT. It's a ski resort but has a cute Main St., supposedly.
Kirby,
Estes Park has 5,858 inhabitants. I don't think this is big enough to call it a city. Wikipedia called it a town. I might downgrade it to a village.
That's permanent residents. Estes Park is a tourist town. There are probably 20k+ tourists there at any time.
Estes gets three million plus visitors every summer... And beyond tourists, seasonal residents go up 20k or so over the summer, iirc. There are a few parks in Estes...Stanley park, with tennis courts and grills and fields and a playground, and bond park, in the middle of main street, with benches and grass, where they sometimes have music and art fairs and the like. Town is probably the best term for Estes... Estes is the name of one of the earliest settlers. Why park? Maybe because it was named before the national park system, so it was a broader term at the time? Rmnp is probably a bit too 'wild' for Kirby, though if you want to really get 'out there,' the never summer wilderness is better - can backpack five days without seeing another soul. Indian peaks are good too, and tend to be traveled more by locals than tourists.
Whatever you do, dont feed the animals.
Kirby,
Do we have any parks that we call cities?
How about this: Rock City. It's a private park too, so this is something of a two-fer.
Thank you for downgrading Estes Park from city to town. I feel less like Alzheimer's, which ain't cute!
Now I have two downgrades from the two people who've visited.
Ok, blood pressure declining.
How many stoplights are there in Estes Park? How many make up a town, how many make up a city?
We have only two stoplights in Delhi, although we have a population of about 5000 (I don't think this number includes 3000 college students during the season?).
There is also a problem with mountain lion range, and with how much administration there is within national parks.
How wild is it? Could be a question we apply to large American parks. Totally wild would mean no human management of any kind.
Is there ANY space that's still like that in the world today?
Perhaps the interior of Antarctica would be closest, and yet even that is visited by scientists and other interlopers like Al Gore, looking to confirm his biases.
I'm not sure.
The other remaining question is that of a mountain lion's range. The NY Times' article says that MOST mountain lions only travel about 100 miles in a lifetime (and are only quite mobile when looking for a mate, and are on the prowl).
Could it be that SOME mountain lions can go 2000 miles or so, as is alleged with regard to the one that was run over in CT two weeks back?
Could one be hyperactive, in other words, for some reason?
Or did the DEP attempt to explain the inexplicable by suddenly increasing the range for this one mountain lion, and therefore confirming the biased notion that there are none here by definition and so this one HAD to have come here from SD of its own volition for reasons unknown?
It would be best if the mountain lions had a spokesman, or spokesperson, or spokescougar, to discuss these problems. As it is, we have only the DEP spokespersons on the one hand, and all the mad bloggers of the wild throughout the northeast on the other.
Who are we to believe?
The bloggers have an agenda driven perhaps partially by fascination, and perhaps partially by conspiracy theories about the DEP. The DEP may have an agenda to redistribute mountain lions. Perhaps there is some deep corps within the DEP that has infiltrated the agency via groups like Earth First! in order to cause a redistribution of the wild.
We can only speculate.
Thanks to Brett for his partially generous (good taste) and partially for his agism (cute!), and for his characterization of me as nerdlike, but not known to be so by European women.
How can JH stand to miss out on this conversation?
Again, he's thinking of leaving us!
Who will stand in as Catholic apologist with a Mertonian Merlinian agenda?
He's irreplaceable!
Middletown CT paper has DEP commissioner arguing that the mountain lion's appearance is a positive sign that mountain lions will make a major comeback:
Personnel from several agencies have expended a great deal of time and effort in investigating the mysterious appearance of this mountain lion in Connecticut. These include the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, USDA Forest Service’s Wildlife Genetics laboratory, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources , and the New York State Museum in Albany.
“A wild mountain lion traveling through our state is certainly an anomaly,” Commissioner Esty said. “It is, however, a strong symbol of what we all hope for – that wilderness areas and biological diversity can be preserved and protected. Thankfully, through the hard work and dedication of conservations, wildlife experts and everyone who cares about our environment and natural resources our state and nation have made great progress in achieving this goal.”
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