Great Plains Outfitters

So ready for September!! Good luck everyone!!

So how many Deer did this guy save?? Lions kill there fair share of deer but they also help balance things out.

GPS-collared mountain lions in south-central New Mexico killed 84 coyotes across four years of monitoring. Coyotes were their second most common prey after mule deer, ahead of beavers, raccoons, carp, and African gemsbok. One in every eight kills a mountain lion made in the Chihuahuan Desert was a coyote. Nobody expected the animal most people think of as the dominant canid predator in the West to show up as routine prey for the cat living above it.

Prude and colleagues published the dataset in Wildlife Biology in 2021 after investigating 1,073 GPS location clusters from collared pumas at the Armendaris Ranch and Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge along the Rio Grande in south-central New Mexico between 2014 and 2018. Of those clusters, 686 turned out to be kill sites. The researchers hiked to each one, identified the prey species from the remains, and built the most detailed prey composition profile ever assembled for mountain lions in the Chihuahuan Desert. Thirty-two different species appeared on the list. Mule deer led at 195 kills. Coyotes came second at 84.

The number is large enough to rule out opportunism. A mountain lion that kills a coyote once or twice during a multi-year study may have stumbled onto one at a carcass or encountered one at a water source. Eighty-four kills across 686 total represents a consistent pattern. The pumas were hunting coyotes deliberately and regularly, treating a 30-pound canid predator as a food source the same way they treated a 30-pound beaver or a 15-pound raccoon.

Most of the coyote kills were not associated with cached prey from other species. Twenty-one of 24 investigated coyote kill sites contained only the coyote. The puma had not killed a deer, attracted a scavenging coyote, and killed the scavenger. It had gone after the coyote as the primary target. The coyote was the meal, not a bystander at someone else's.

The rest of the prey list reads like an inventory of everything living along the Rio Grande corridor. Beavers at 70 kills. Raccoons at 51. Common carp at 49, meaning mountain lions in the Chihuahuan Desert were walking into the river and catching fish. Gemsbok, the African antelope that New Mexico released onto White Sands Missile Range in the 1960s, appeared at 35 kills. One mature male puma killed 29 adult gemsbok during the study period, comprising 58 percent of his total documented kills. That single cat had specialized in killing a 450-pound antelope armed with 34-inch spear-like horns capable of killing a lion in Africa. He killed 29 of them.

The dietary breadth tells a story about what a mountain lion actually is versus what most people assume it is. The popular image is a deer specialist, a solitary cat that stalks mule deer through the mountains and eats little else. The New Mexico data showed an animal eating 32 species ranging from carp and waterfowl to adult gemsbok weighing four times what the cat weighed. The mountain lion is not a specialist. It is a generalist predator that kills whatever the landscape holds, and in south-central New Mexico the landscape holds coyotes at a density high enough that killing them regularly is worth the effort.

The coyote kills also carried an ecological implication the researchers noted. Mountain lion predation on coyotes is a form of intraguild predation, a larger predator killing a smaller one. Where mountain lions are present and active, coyote populations may be suppressed not through competition for food but through direct killing. The 84 coyotes removed from the New Mexico study area across four years represent a measurable reduction in a mesopredator whose own prey, rabbits, ground-nesting birds, and rodents, may benefit from the coyote's absence. The mountain lion eating the coyote may be indirectly protecting the coyote's prey without intending to.

Image is for illustration purposes only

Source: Prude et al. (2021), Wildlife Biology / Armendaris Ranch / Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge / BioOne.

This heat has got us thinking of some nice fall and winter days in the woods. Whether you want to take a lion home or just take pictures give us a call !!! Dirk 307-752-0154

Give us a holler have had a couple openings come about for this fall/winter !!!
Dirk 307-752-0154
Or message me here !!! Happy hunting everyone!!

A young male mountain lion designated M3 left the Desert National Wildlife Refuge north of Las Vegas, walked 106 miles through the northern Mojave Desert to the Grand Canyon, got into a fight that left him mortally wounded, turned around, and tried to walk home. He covered 610 miles total. He ate nothing but reptiles on the return trip. He died 21 miles from where he was born.

David Choate, a USGS ecologist who had spent seven years studying cougars on the 1.6-million-acre Desert National Wildlife Refuge, had captured and GPS-collared M3 in the Sheep Range, a long narrow mountain chain that forms the eastern spine of the refuge. The Sheep Range rises out of the Mojave floor into limestone peaks above 9,000 feet, supporting desert bighorn sheep, mule deer, and the small number of mountain lions that feed on them. M3 was a young male. Young males leave. That is what the species does. They walk until they find unoccupied territory or die trying.

M3 walked south from the Sheep Range through Gold Butte, crossed the northern Mojave, and reached the northwestern edge of the Grand Canyon, roughly 106 miles from home. His GPS collar recorded every step. His average pace was about three miles a day. While he was in his natal range, where he knew the terrain and the prey, he made a kill every seven days on average. During dispersal, that interval more than doubled to every 17 and a half days. The desert between the Sheep Range and the Grand Canyon held little to eat for a young cougar moving through unfamiliar ground.

At the Grand Canyon, something happened. Choate's team examined the evidence afterward and concluded that M3 had likely gotten into a fight with another cougar, probably over food or a mate. The injuries were severe. The territory he had walked 106 miles to reach was already occupied by a resident male, and the resident had made that clear in the way cougars make things clear. M3 did not win.

Then he turned around.

Badly injured, in unfamiliar country, the young male reversed direction and began walking back toward the Sheep Range. He did not wander. He did not circle. His GPS track showed a direct line toward the mountains where he had been born. Choate and his co-authors Kathleen Longshore and Daniel Thompson described this as the first documented evidence of natural, unmanipulated natal homing behavior by a dispersing male cougar. No one had relocated him. No one had pushed him. He chose to go back on his own.

The return was slow. M3 was injured badly enough that he could no longer hunt the way a healthy cougar hunts. A mountain lion kills by ambush, by explosive acceleration over short distances, by jumping onto the back of a deer or a bighorn and bringing it down with weight and claws. An injured cougar that cannot sprint, cannot jump, cannot wrestle a 150-pound animal to the ground, cannot hunt. M3 ate reptiles. Lizards. Snakes. Whatever he could catch on the desert floor without the burst of speed that his injuries had taken from him. Choate's team found no evidence of any mammalian kill during the homing journey.

He made it to the south end of the Sheep Range. He was 21 miles from where Choate's team had first captured and collared him. Twenty-one miles from the territory he knew, the water sources he had memorized, the bighorn trails he had hunted as a juvenile. His body was found there. He had walked 610 miles in total across some of the most barren terrain in the lower 48 states, and the last 21 miles were the ones he did not finish.

Choate told KNPR that M3 had come home to die, then caught himself and added that maybe that was anthropomorphizing a little. The GPS data does not anthropomorphize. It shows a young male cougar that left home, traveled to the Grand Canyon, was beaten by a resident, reversed course, navigated back across 106 miles of open desert on a diet of lizards, and died within sight of the mountains where he started.

Image is for illustration purposes only

Source: Choate, Longshore, and Thompson (2018), Western North American Naturalist / USGS Western Ecological Research Center / KNPR Desert Companion.