Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Mt Lion takes out big mule deer buck

Id love to hear one taking a deer when i had a gun. Im figuring id get a bullet in it.

Ive called for them at times when archery or M L hunting for deer or elk in West Texas, NM and Colorado when ive come across sign but never called one in-that i know of.

pretty common in my parts.......

You ever call one in? I forget the name of the outfit that makes cougar specific calls.

Check this out, some of the best lion footage I've seen.

Some years back we had a bunch of kids in the guest cabins at Big Bend Ranch State Park. We had gone out hiking and I forgot my binocs on a hill about an hour away. On that hike we had come across fresh tracks at a waterhole in the rocks. Only free time I had to go get them (as opposed to supervising kids) was in the evening, I did the whole hike in the dark right past that spot I felt "watched" the whole time.

What I do remember about that walk was that the stars were incredible.

Birdwatcher

I like the way the lion walks up to the decoy, then immediately starts looking around for the hunter, and busts him.

When we lived 6 miles outside of our small town here in Montana, I was standing at the livingroom picture window one morning with a cup of coffee, and a young lion chased a mule deer fawn across the hills 200 yards away. Didn't get the fawn, and I never saw the lion again. Saw another one sneaking up on some Angus cows with calves in late summer in the nearby mountains one day, but the lion saw me and slunk off.

When I was a wildlife biology student at the U. of Montana, one of my buddies in graduate school was doing a lion study and found they pretty regularly take down mature mule deer and bull elk in winter, when the bucks and bulls are worn down and usually in small herds or often alone.

For more'n ten years I was actually well paid to count endangered birds on Camp Bullis (I actually QUIT, it just took up pretty much every Sat/Sun from March through June). Lion sightings were/are regular on that military training area right on the edge of the city.

There was a rocky defile inside the range fans where the lion/lions holed up, that being the least frequented area of the base, in fact the once-annual forays of the bird crew were likely the only human disturbance up that ravine. That musk stench was a given. It was usual to get that sense of being "watched" on the hillsides back there.

Smelt it again one time near the edge of the base (near the Dominion). There was a freshly dead raccoon backed into a hollow on the ground, eyes open and lips still drawn back in a grimace, four widely spaced and deep claw marks up the side I could see from its rump to its neck. The leaf litter was all scraped and scattered and that same musk stench present.

Last time I smelt it was after me and the dogs were walking in an adjacent city park after dark. From just up a hill came a deep rumbling growl straight out of the Discovery Channel, then I heard it again a bit farther off along the slope. The dogs are schooled not to chase deer etc... and this time they just stood and listened. Went into the woods there the next day and found an uprooted sapling, bark clawed into shreds, the leaf litter scraped away, and that pungent cat odor.

Birdwatcher

Same park at night a couple of years later, walking the dogs.

A sudden scuffle maybe 50 yards off somewhere off behind a cedar thicket, and the thin plaintive bleating of a deer, about like a baby goat, the bleating suddenly cut off. Again the dogs just stood and listened intently.

The very next day the park was closed for a week after a lion sighting.

Birdwatcher

You're correct.

Animals do not think and reason as we humans do. That is Nature at work... or, as Mr. Darwin would say, "A classic example of Natural Selection."

P.S. - That overly dramatic music in the video is really cheesy.

L.W.

Rainshadow specializes in cougar calls. My son and I have called close to a dozen using his calls, and improved our percentages significantly by using his sounds.

I liked your last words about trying to call them, that you hadn't called any that you know about. I've called quite a few that I didn't know about-- until checking tracks in snow later.

They are the sneakiest critter of the 30 or so species that I've called. My guesstimate is that most of those that come to hunter calls are never seen by the hunter. They readily come closer and check out call sounds.

In deep dusk at the end of an hour long calling stand in a slick snow rough clearcut, a lion growled at me from a brushy ravine 40 feet away when I picked up my decoy. He had sneaked up close without me seeing him and my guess is that he considered the decoy his and was expressing his anger at my stealing his prey. He never let me see him.

Fantastic video! Thanks for posting. Hard to believe that the big cat could kill such a big deer in that fashion.
What a grim way to die.

A couple buddies of mine in Central California were calling coyotes with a foxpro, one of the ones with remote control. They just set up next to a clearing, and were hiding when a guy & girl ride up on dirt bikes, stop, get off, and start setting up a picnic. One of the hunters says to the other, "watch this" and plays "mountain lion in heat", which was described as a god-awful screaming, caterwauling call.

The couple frantically packed up, jumped on their bikes, and sped away, while the hunters laid on the ground laughing.

About 20 years ago a hunting partner and I were walking down a Forest Service Road near Pinto Rock in the Red Zone East of Mt Saint Helens Elk Hunting, when a fawn came off the uphill side of the road and went into the brush on the downside of the road about 100 yards ahead of us. A couple of minutes later a Mtn Lion came off the upside of the road behind the fawn played around a couple of minutes on the road and then followed the fawn into the brush on the downhill side.

A couple years ago we came home to find our Siamese Cat up under the hood of an old Ford p/u and a Cougar laying next to the p/u trying to get the cat. We chased him out of the yard with our Ford Exploder and went over and took up residence in a neighbor's horse barn.

In May of 1973 I was moving West from Jacksonville, FL when I stopped for the night at the West Campground in Yellowstone National Park. I couldn't sleep so I decided to get up and drive. When I reached the entrance to Yellowstone's North Campground there was a cougar standing alongside the road in front of the campground sign with people sleeping in the campground with no clue that that cat was that close to their proximity.

You live in some great country, Ok.

Any particular call of his you recommend without buying the whole lot. What caller you use with his calls?

I have unsuccesfully used a deer bleat which has worked well on bobcat ajd coyotes.

I think I just read an Okanagan story on
the Rainshadow call site.

Lions sounds are the most effective for calling cats but I have called in more than 20 using prey sounds. I don't have any lion sounds on my Foxpro and no way to load any. Mostly I use deer bleats. I can call them by mouth but had a couple sneak in behind me and I don't intentionally do that anymore- at least not when I am alone.

A pretty good article here on the interactions between wolves and lions. Despite lions occasionally killing wolves, seems like in many places wolves have the upper hand....

http://www.mtpioneer.com/2012-September-Mountain-Lions-and%20Wolves.html

�In one tracking sequence in fresh snow, wolves chased a lion from a kill site, in and out of cover, and treed the lion,� Ruth told the Times. �The wolves went back up to the kill site, and later the lion went back to the site but there was nothing left.� (Grizzly bears are also believed to take kills away from mountain lions, and wolves).

Seven cats, in all, observed during the study, were found to have starved to death. The starvations most likely result from lions being driven from their kills, even as the cats burn energy and calories that are wasted when they are driven off by other predators. The other predators also decrease the prey that is available to the lions.

Can't find the reference but I'm recalling reading of one Idaho wolf pack right after wolves came back that was responsible for the demise of a number of lions. Seems the pack learned to track the lions and systematically steal their kills, and actually killing a few of the starving lions direct.

Birdwatcher

most fascinating