Free: Contests & Raffles.
Sounds like a Cat, do you have any trailcams you can put out, or anyone you know close by have a caller to try and coax him out for a shot?With that much activity I would not want my kids wandering around outside until you can deal with the issue.
Youre backed up to thousands of acres of timberland and you already know you have a cat problem, so why do you need tcam pics to buy a tag? You should always have one.
that doesn't really look like a cat kill especially with the leg drug way off from the skeleton- unless as said the coyotes got to it after the cat. Looks like a wolf (or at least canine kill) more than a cat. I agree with bango you know cats are there- I would buy a tag and start hunting cats and big dogs
Probably a lion kill if they are in the area, then picked clean by other critters is my hunch. The area in the Methow that we found over 24 lion kills in it had a few that had been cached then drug out by something else and picked clean. All those kills were in a couple mile radius and looked to have been from the previous spring or early spring, we found them in a migration route the deer in that area will use to go back into the high country in March/Apri, that cat had a field day in there, very little of the deer were eaten, mostly hind quarters then buried, I've heard from a game fella I know that once the meat starts to spoil they abandon that kill and go get another, hence the 50-60 deer a year per cat fact. The previous year in another area about 10 miles away we ran into over a dozen cached kills that were fairly fresh, in fact a few of those were bucks with 2 of them being real dandies, those looked to have been about a month old(maybe august/septemberish), we got a glimpse of the cat on our way out and told a couple young fellas who had lion tags where we seen him and about all the kills, they went in the next day and shot him while actualy guarding a fresh kill. Like a lot of folks have said, you have a lion frequiting your property and you have kids, kill it on sight, that thing has probably seen you and your kids many, many times without you even knowing it. This is exactly the powder keg situation I have spoke of and in many areas the fuse is becoming very short unfortunately. They will continue doing their studies, spending our money and putting out under estimated numbers of these things while apparently everyone except WDFW sees how cougar populations have exploded, they will drag their feet on this issue and keep feeding the public their way off population numbers until some very bad encounters increasingly happen, thats to late in my book, there is a lion problem in this state, it needs to be addressed NOW, actually should have been tackled about 10 years ago IMO, we actually would have more game in some parts of this state if they would have addressed it then. IMO thats a very scary situation you have going on there, your doing the right thing by not letting the kids out and about unsupervised.
