Timing's everything when it comes to spotting wildlife, and it's amazing to think how little random decisions and distractions set up that lucky timetable of right place, right time.
Right place, right time certainly describes Ryan Headlee's fortunes on November 4, when, after a "bitter cold" day of cruising backroads on south-central British Columbia's Thompson Plateau near the city of Kamloops, he came across a band of mule-deer does.
In a post to Facebook (h/t Wide Open Spaces), Headlee explains he "was just checking [the deer] out when, all of a sudden, this mountain lion jumps out of the bush next to me with a loud snarl, and takes down a doe, throwing her to the road!"
Headlee managed to take some pictures of the attack on the frosty road: the puma applying a trademark throat-bite to the doe as it manoeuvred her to the shoulder.
"I watched the deer expire and I locked eyes with the cougar for a few minutes until a passing car scared him off," Headlee wrote. "What a feeling to witness such a rare event! The explosive power of this cougar really surprised me!"
Across their vast North American range, pumas (aka cougars or mountain lions) stalk a wide variety of animals, but ungulates are overall their most important prey – that's not the case in Central and South America, by the way, where small and medium-sized mammals make up more of the cats' diet – and in many areas deer specifically serve as their signature quarry.
Headlee isn't the first person to watch a puma/deer contest play out in the middle of the road. A similar attack was filmed in central Colorado in 2008:
And, rarely, this kind of predation is a trailside spectacle: a few years back, a jogger in Northern California witnessed a drawn-out struggle between a puma and a blacktail buck.
Feather-footed stealth, explosive short-range speed and gymnastic leaping ability, combined with major muscle and a throttling bite: a solo puma is well equipped to take down deer as big (or bigger) than itself. But brand-new research suggests the solitary hunters aren't always so solitary when it comes to eating: Panthera's Teton Cougar Project has uncovered evidence that pumas may share their kills with others, perhaps in a quid pro quo sort of social arrangement.
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Header image: Garret Voight/Flickr
Predator vs Prey
Backyard wildlife
Predator vs Prey
