Scats like Golden Eagles

The morning after our fire adventure began our first day of scouting for RDNA, looking for cougar kills at Cloverdale Ranch.



First we scoured the willow thickets, thinking that those may be good places for cougars to drag their kills for privacy. Each thicket sported a number of buck rubs, but no cougar sign that we could find. The grassland surrounding the thickets was dry and brittle, crackling loudly with each step, and we speculated that a hunting cougar might avoid such noisy conditions.

We continued west along the main trail with some of our number fanned out on the landscape to the left and right. Brown, bounding shapes caught our eyes, and solidified into one large and two smaller deer, running west along the southern side of the valley. They held their heads and tails high and moved with a springy gait that covered the open ground quickly. They reached the edge of the grasses and slowed to a trot, looking over their shoulders toward our group, then disappeared into the thick brush on the north-facing slope. One of our scouts came out of the brush to the South and ran up to us on the trail, breathless. “I just saw a huge buck! Did you see him? Four points on a really tall rack. He had two does with him.” Perhaps he was the buck responsible for the rubs on the willows?

Further west, we came to a dry creek bordered with more willow. A culvert passed under the path, and the willows shaded it well, offering an inviting rest area to confer about our finds and strategize on finding cougar sign. As we began discussing, we also began noticing the sign around us. The trail was full of scats, large dense tubes in a segmented shape, some of which appeared lacquered and smooth. One was astonishingly moist and black, emitting a strong odor of rotten meat. Cougar scat? Bobcat? Another carnivore? The size was just on the edge between the two feline suspects.

One of us spoke up, “You know, cougars have scats like Golden Eagles.” The group met this statement with uncomprehending looks. “Every time I see a bird and think it might be a Golden Eagle but I’m unsure, I have to assume it’s not. When I’ve seen a Golden Eagle it’s so obviously a Golden Gagle, that if I have to ask it’s probably not. The same with cougar scat. When I've seen confirmed cougar sign, it's so obviously cougar and nothing else. So cougars take poops like Golden Eagles.” Hm. This was not a very Golden Eagle scat.

Also along the trail were bird pellets at least three and a half inches long and white splats of bird scat. The pellets were large enough to indicate a very large predatory bird, but the willows offered very little in the way of attractive roosts. Following our curiosity, we poked a little further in under the willows, looking for more concentrations of whitewash. When we brushed aside the leaf litter at the base of a large old willow, we found something far more interesting than bird scat.

Tucked under the tree was the half-covered carcass of a canine, empty flesh tented up on sharp bones, unmolested by scavengers and still curled nose-to-tail as if in sleep. The teeth were long and sharp and white and the large ears lay at a relaxed angle. The hide still held a thin covering of dusty-tawny fur, hairs ticked with dark and light like a deer’s coat. We admired our find in silence for a time. Later, another student took measurements of the skull: 8.5 inches.



When our questions about the area had piled up to frustrating levels, we left and spread out over the landscape on a wander. I walked out along the trail to the reservoir in the company of a fellow scout. We passed coyotebush, and scrubby oaks, tall bunchgrasses, and dusty patches of path rich with animal tracks. As we passed through another willow patch, something happened in my companion’s body language, a change small enough to be indescribable but still perceptible. I felt something shift in my posture, too, and looked at my companion, asking “what does your body radar say about this place?” He looked back with big eyes and a grin, “Yeah! Something just changed. A transition spot?”

We stopped and looked more thoroughly around us. Bucks had savagely – and recently— shredded the willows just off trail. Then we noticed that another trail of deer tracks crossed this spot at an angle, cutting across the trail of tracks we had been following along the path. Not necessarily a transition spot, but a meeting of two routes and a signpost. A fun find, but still not cougar sign.

We rounded a bend in the path and came face-to-face with a buck. He stood with his neck outstretched, his body up and forward on his forefeet, and leaned sideways at an almost comical angle to get a better view of us around the bend. Or rather, his pose would have been comical if not for his attitude. His radar dish ears focused unwaveringly on us. We stood frozen but he had been well aware of us long before we walked up on him. Huge dark eyes glared at us, and he shifted on his feet to give an indignant stomp. Then another of our scouts came around the bend behind him, and with a snort he bounded up the slope to the East.

The day was winding down into afternoon, and though we had a collection of stories and questions to show for it, none of them featured a cougar. We were trudging back toward the gate discussing our options for tracking stations, when someone pointed toward the south-facing slope. “What’s that? Is that a kill?”

We clambered up the slope to find a desiccated and dismembered deer carcass. The limbs were detached and strewn about, and all of the soft tissue was gone. Even some of the bones had been eaten – the vertebrae all had their spinous processes raggedly chewed off and the ribs were considerably shorter than natural, chewed off in a consistent line cutting across the ribcage. The neck was twisted in a tight corkscrew shape and the velvet-covered spike antlers had dry grass tangled and twisted around them. We circled the area for a bit, trying to piece together the sequence of events.



We moved on to sit and listen to the birds while we waited for the rest of the class to arrive. After searching all day and finding no trace of our goal, we’d finally found it out in the open right next to the path that we’d walked in on, just as we were preparing to leave. Typical.