This photo, taken on the 11th of June, is our fourth photo of a cougar from Walnut Spring since the 16th of April. Interestingly, the foot placement of this cougar is identicle to that of the cougar photographed on 8 May.

This cougar was photographed in Release Canyon on the 7th of June, just a few days after our bighorn ram photos were taken at this same location.

This cougar was photographed in Silver Canyon on 23 May. Another cougar photograph was obtained from this location on 26 March (see April posts). As with the photographs of the cougar in Summer Spring Canyon, we are struck by the fact that these cats seem to travel precisely the same path, even in a relatively wide and seemingly uniform wash.

This next photo was taken on the 18th of May in the north central portion of the Fra Cristobal range. Most of our cougar photos are taken between dusk and dawn. This photo is unusual in that it was taken at 8:25am, long after the sun had risen.

We have obtained a number of new cougar photos over the last month. The above two photos were taken on the 8th and 9th of May at Walnut Spring.

Now that we have a collar on one cougar, we know for certain when we are getting a photograph of other individuals. Our collared cougar recently moved north along the Rio Grande. We had thought that it would have passed by our remote camera set in a narrow passage along the river. We checked the camera today to find ANOTHER large male cougar passing along the same spot.

It seems we have identified a relative hot-spot of cougar activity. This is the first time we have found cougar sign in the same place twice. I also found a scrape about 30 m from where this photo was taken. A scrape is a site of chemical communication where male cougar create a small mound of soil and organic matter and a 15 to 25cm depression in the soil and debris by scraping the surface of the ground with their hind feet. Frequently, they then defecate and urinate on the mound of debris. Typically males make scrapes throughout their home range along travel routes and near kills. An Idaho study found that cougar scrapes were more common along home range boundaries (similar to what has been found for tigers, jaguars, and leopards). A study of cougar scraping behavior in the San Andres Mountains of New Mexico by Ken Logan and Linda Sweanor found that 26 to 33 percent of a male's scrape sites were shared with one or two other males.