In our neighborhood, especially during their two-month mating season in February and March, we’re always cautious about the presence of skunks when we let our dog Chester out in the back yard in the early morning or at night.
Yes, he’s been spritzed once, but the second time he saw a skunk he backed off quickly, even though he got a glancing blow of the odiferous critter’s love potion.
However, after reading a recent story in the Albuquerque Journal and seeing a report on an El Paso television station, maybe we should start worrying about another more dangerous species of wild animal — cougars.
A woman in Rio Rancho was surprised recently when she went to open her back door and found a cougar lounging on her back patio with its head on a basketball. She said she almost went out the door and stepped on it before quickly retreating and calling another person in the house to verify what she had seen. She said a cousin who was in the home saw the critter and blurted out “Oh S—, that’s a mountain lion.”
“Curse words do not escape this man’s lips often,” she said of her normally proper cousin.
The Game and Fish Department was summoned to the home and the animal was eventually tranquilized and moved to a safe location away from the urban area.
And in 2011, a young cougar was struck and killed on a busy street on the west side of Albuquerque.
Two weeks ago, an El Paso television station showed a video clip from a phone of a cougar roaming in an arroyo on the west side of the west Texas town. That animal was not found, although there were several other sightings reported in the area.
I looked up information about cougars in New Mexico on various websites and found that there may be as many as 2,500 roaming around the state. There is a hunting season for them and as of the first six months of this year, 27 have been “harvested,” in a euphemistic description offered by the New Mexico Game and Fish Department.
The website also said that our state is a prime mountain lion habitat because of the wide variety of terrain, wide open spaces and plentiful supply of various food sources.
What made me think about this was a story by a next door neighbor who about two years ago told me she saw a cougar on top of the roof of a building just over the rock wall fence behind our house.
“It was very large and it had a long tail,” she insisted.
“Oh sure,” I thought to myself. “She probably had a couple of drinks and saw the fat feral tomcat that drives Chester nuts when he wanders through the back yard.”
Now, maybe I’m not so sure.
aero-cordero.com 