We Caught 37m and ~20 First Graders
Last week Yiwei and I got to go talk with 5th, 7th, and 1st graders at Hillbrook School in Los Gatos. We brought along some of our field equipment and a puma skin from the UCSC Natural History Collection. After the talks were over, the first graders even lined up so...
A miss and a hit! – meet 37M
After over eight months since 36M’s capture, our team here has been itching to catch a new puma. Over the weekend, we tried to catch an uncollared animal using a cage baited by some road kill deer. While we succeeded in luring the animal into the trap, s/he managed to...
Leopards and mirrors!
Here is a cute video of leopards discovering a mirror in the forests of Gabon for the first time (probably). These were probably two juvenile individuals, trying to figure out where the other kitties were hiding so that they could play with them. Like most animals,...
Giving us the slip
Some pumas are really good at evading capture (like 3M from last week's post). They either do a great job hiding (from hound-dog noses) in trees, or learn to avoid our cages while feeding on our baits. One of the males we have been trying to recapture for months now,...
R.I.P, 3M.
I received a message from a friend a couple of days ago with curious news: a friend of his had found a puma skeleton and tracking collar near Wilder Ranch State Park, and did I want the collar? “Yes, of course” I replied, suspecting that the remains must be those of...
Great shots of puma kitten in tree
In the past two weeks, we have been setting out deer baits throughout the Santa Cruz Mountains in hopes of collaring 1-2 new pumas and re-catching a couple of collared individuals. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of our biologists and hound dogs, the pumas all...
Awesome video from Wyoming of fighting eagles!
Puma kills provide food for many freeloaders - I mean scavengers, including eagles! Scientists from the Craighead Beringia South and Panthera have captured some fun footage of bald eagles fighting over a meal provided by their friendly, neighborhood puma. While pumas...
Happy Holidays! See you next year…
The Santa Cruz Mountains Puma Project wishes you joy during this holiday season, and we will return to blogging next year. For our last blog, we thought we'd share a story from Florida, the last home to pumas (called panthers there) in the eastern US. Recently, camera...
7F recaptured yesterday
Yesterday, the team recaptured 7F in Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve in Los Gatos in order to replace her collar, which was about to run out of batteries. She's one of our oldest and most successful cats, at about 9 years old, and is currently raising a one year old...
Would you rather…
Encounter a puma in the forest? ...Or a wild boar? Joggers and hikers may fear pumas, but how often do they think about wild boars when running through the woods? These animal have thrived and multiplied in California since being introduced in the 1920s. Wild boars...
