A Tale of Seven Pumas: Numbers 1-2

Our particular interest on this Chile trip was trying to find puma (mountain lion) in Patagonia. The local cattle and sheep estancias are slowly converting to wildlife tourism, and instead of shooting the pumas (which are protected in Chile) they now track them and bring people like us to see them. The animals (some more than others) are getting slowly habituated to vehicles, and don’t act as secretively as they once did, and as they still do in most of the US (where they can be legally hunted).

I’ll tell the tale in four blog posts, chronologically, and perhaps with pauses for other things, so you don’t get too blasé about pumas.

We had been traveling all day from Tierra del Fuego, a 7am start, a 2 hour drive, a ferry across the Straits of Magellan, and another 6 hours on the road. We were almost at our lodge, the Hotel Pehoé on an island in a lake in Torres del Paine National Park. There were a few cars pulled over on the side of the road, so we stopped too. Right by the road a mother puma had killed a baby guanaco for her two cubs, and the mother and one cub were feeding a few feet away, unconcerned. The cub is about two months old.

One cub was nowhere to be seen, but the remaining one was curious and unafraid. In the left foreground you can see the leg of the kill.

The bond between them was almost tangible:

I’m not sure if you can see, but the cub still has blue eyes. The mother groomed her cub thoroughly, from top:

to bottom:

The cub is clearly showing an interest in meat, but it is still nursing as well, which may be what it is trying to do here:

The mother was elegant

and not to be trifled with, keeping a careful eye on her human fans:

After nine minutes they moved slowly off back into the scrub, the cub bounding ahead:

and the mother eventually taking the lead:

And they melted away into the 700 square miles of the park. We were extraordinarily lucky. It is rare to see puma in the national park itself, because the rules require you to stay on the official park road. For the next two days we will be searching outside the park with a tracker.

PS The puma, Puma concolor, has many other names, including mountain lion, and cougar. It is not officially a big cat. There are only five of those, all in the sub-family Pantherinae. Pumas are not in this sub-family, which contains the four cats that can roar – lion, tiger, jaguar and leopard – and their very close non-roaring relative the snow leopard. Instead, they are in the sub-family Felinae, alongside cheetahs, lynx and bobcats.

According to Wikipedia, pumas are the fourth largest cat species worldwide; adults stand up to 90 cm (35 in) tall at the shoulders. Adult males are around 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in) long from nose to tail tip, and females average 2.05 m (6 ft 9 in). Males weigh up to 72 kg (159 lb), and females up to 48 kg (106 lb). The largest recorded cougar, shot in 1901, weighed 105.2 kg (232 lb).

Iriarte et al (1990) show that pumas who live nearer the poles weigh much more than they do closer to the equator. In Patagonia, their mean body weight is 55.6Kg, vs 43.6Kg in Arizona. They’re roughly the size of a cheetah, and much lighter than a lion. But they are perfectly capable, very very rarely, of killing humans