Spring and Wildlife Comeback Follow Up

Click photos for larger.

Yesterday I posted about Spring and the comeback of wildlife in my area and I solicited comments from others in different areas of the country to see if their experiences are the same. It seems like a resounding "yes" (both at ChicagoBoyz and at Life in the Great Midwest). I am always amazed at how nature can adapt and thrive.

I received an email from Mike Doughty, who has given me permission to post it along with some amazing photos. We will get to that in a second. As an aside he also gave me permission to post his email address but I am loathe to post it for obvious reasons. If you are interested in emailing him, drop me a line here and I will forward his email address to you.

Some have mentioned that along with all of this new (or should I say, more plentiful) wildlife comes predators. True. A few months ago we had cougar sightings in Southern Wisconsin for the first time in about a century. They still don't know if it was a pet someone let loose or what, but my money says that it "hoofed it" (pawed it?) here from the woods in northern Wisconsin. Now we are getting more cougar sightings. With all of the deer we have, I think that eventually that will be one fat cougar. Either that or they have begun to reproduce already.

I think this is ultra cool and fascinating, but it worries me at the same time. I don't want my pets or (much worse) kids getting hunted by vicious big cats. You want to see some laws violated? If the cougar population goes up, EVERYBODY here in rural Wisconsin will be packing heat, especially farmers (Wisconsin is one of only two states that has not decriminalized conceal carry - the other state is Illinois). Personally, I think that livestock will be targeted by the cougars and that a farmer will simply shoot them and toss their carcasses into one of their fields before they can get steady footing. I sure would shoot it if I were a farmer and was losing livestock.

Wolves have already made somewhat of a comeback in the northern parts of the state, and I have even heard of moose and elk up there as well.

On to Mr. Doughty's email:

Good morning. I'm writing this as an email rather than as a comment on the Chicago Boyz blog because I've got some photos that I want to include.

I live in Colorado, in a development on the western edge of Colorado Springs, in what's known as an "urban-wildland interface". Here is a list of larger animals that I've seen from my deck or on the road up the hill to my house in the past year or so:

Deer on a daily basis
Fox
Wild Turkeys
Bobcats
Coyotes
Bears (actually ON my deck on a number of occasions)
Mountain Lions

All this within a 15 to 20 minute drive of the middle of downtown Colorado Springs. There is no doubt that wildlife is making a huge comeback in urban/suburban areas. Most people think this is great, as do I with the following reservation: When wildlife returns, predators soon follow. Here in our area, some people are growing increasingly concerned with lions. Here are photos taken this past Monday shortly after midnight outside the house of a guy that lives roughly a third of a mile (as the crow flies) from me. He has motion activated lights and cameras at various points around his home and quite often gets shots like these:

This is a large lion, looking in the sliding glass door of this guy's bedroom, approximately 10 feet from his bed where he and his wife were looking at it through the glass.

We have had instances of large dogs (over 100 pounds) being attacked, people being stalked, lions around homes in the middle of the day, etc. Inevitably, I fear, we are going to have an attack on a person. Of course, the majority of the people here believe that lions are not a "real" problem and that those of us who have expressed concern are "fear mongering", etc., although almost none of them have done any research or know anything whatsoever about these animals.

If you'd like to learn more about the whole potential problem with lions expanding their range into urban areas and the reasons for it, an excellent book is "The Beast in the Garden". I highly recommend it.

As an aside, I already ordered that book on Amazon and can't wait for it to arrive. This subject is very interesting to me - and a little scary.

Cross posted at ChicagoBoyz.