I'm going to try to take you guys along here, as best I can.
I called in another Cougar yesterday.
This is about 4000 feet average. It's been a DISMAL snow year this year, with no real Winter snow since Christmas.
We've gotten 2, maybe 3 high snows in the past 10 days. As you'll see, they've pretty much melted right back to about 5000 ft. There's not much snowpack in the Mountains this year.
I went with a friend who has a Cougar tag, in hopes of getting another one on Video. We picked a ridgeline and decided to pound it all day.
Our first stand we came close. Here's the stand...
We climbed up the ridge about 600 yards above the FS road. Decent visibility for this area. Good sign. We found this scratch just before the bench we set-up on...
Mound is on the left, the claw marks are on the right. You can see two distinct ruts.
The same scratch, only from behind the mound, with the claw ruts out past.
We set up and called for about 40 minutes (10 or so minutes of prey distress, followed by a sequence of RS Cougar Vocals, with an intermittent distress scream every now and then) when we both heard a distinct SubAdult whistle from up and left. We continued to call on it until about 70 minutes. Nothing showed.
I allow the tiny, tiny, tiny possibility to remain in my mind that it wasn't a Cougar because it's so warm already that the Northern Flickers have moved back in. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't a Flicker. We didn't hear any of them before or after. (On the third stand, we actually heard a Flicker, similar sound, but it was obviously a bird. Chirpy, and over and over again. This wasn't birdy like that, it was a single whistle.)
My hunting partner is also a very experienced Cougar caller, he and I were both convinced it was a cat, so we decided to stalk that direction and see what we could find.
Here's what we came to about 200 yards around the ridge...
Steep I mean wall-like steep, cliffs, rocks, scrub, from our side there was a real good game trail every 75 yards or so, funnelling into this south facing ridge.
We decided to sit right there and do a quick stand, hoping to make it show itself, or at least call back.
Here's where I messed up...
I turned on the minaska remote, pressed " bank - 0 - 2 " to start RS Cougar Up, then started bumping the volume up listening for it to get louder and louder, starting from minimum. What I didn't realize was that "2" didn't take, I didn't push it clean. And I was jacking up the volume with the sound paused. I realized I'd short stroked the "2" so I hit it again...
A happy, excited Cougar vocal went blasting up the mountianside at full volume!
A nanosecond later something BOLTED from about 100 yards above and left of us. Rocks came tumbling down. We were totally busted! We wasted the next 15 minutes trying to call it back, but I'm sure it was scared out of the country!
Here's a handheld video clip after we gave up and before we headed down...
318 post clip.m2tsWe went down two ridges and tried it again. Ended up doing 5 stands. Nothing doing. Found some interesting stuff and took a couple pics....
