Mountain Lion Video – Female Scent Marking Behavior
Dave Martens of Wildlife Callers Blog captured this trail camera video on one of his cougar scouting circuits.
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Over the past two years, Dave Martens has done an outstanding job of adding trail cameras to our mountain lion scouting areas. He’s found that cougars, while they do sometimes walk the same paths as deer and other animals, often take their own paths and travel “off trail” from the rest of the game.
In this video, you’ll see a female cougar (we’re editing another video of her that confirms it) scent (urine) marking a boulder in a hardpan wash. We recently posted a photo of a large male (tom) cougar here – http://tinyurl.com/ykh755y - travelling in this same hardpan.
We put the trail camera back in video-mode and left it on the hardpan. We’re hopeful that the big tom cougar will come back through the area to check her scent marking. The female cougar has been back a few times. When we’re done editing the rest of the videos we’ll get them posted.
Calling mountain lions consistently requires scouting. It’s taken Dave several months of field work to really begin to understand the way mountain lions travel in our hunting areas. With the research that we’d done on radio collared lions and their propensity to travel the same areas over and over, we believe that his detailed field work will pay off over many years of cougar calling.
Comments and questions are always appreciated!
Goin’ callin’,
Mark Healy
Book Smarts – Three Must-Reads for Mountain Lion Callers
Education is one of the most important elements of successful cougar calling. Here’s a reading list to get you started.
In our quest to consistently locate and call the North American mountain lion we knew that education about the animal’s biology and behavior would be key to our eventual success. Dave Martens and I combed through several sources and found these three books to be of great value.
More than just humorous and exciting reads, these books approach the topic of cougars from a hunting & pursuit perspective and are loaded with useful information for lion callers. Two of the books, Lion Tales by Jon Kibler, and The Longwalkers by Jerry A. Lewis, were authored by professional hunters. The third, Soul Among Lions, was written by retired Arizona Game and Fish biologist Harley Shaw. All Three men dedicated the majority of their adult lives to fully understanding cougars and using hounds to track and bay them.
These books have information on travel behavior, mating behavior, terrain preferences, terrain variations, territorial considerations pertaining to “resident” and “transient” cougars, hunting behavior, behavior after a cougar successfully kills, and much more. Anyone with a desire to call these magnificent cats will benefit from these books.
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Your questions & comments are always appreciated!
Mark Healy
Gray Fox Calling Up Close – Video Attached
Call ‘em close and keep ‘em close. Gray fox are just one predator that can be manipulated with animal vocalizations and distress sounds – watch this little guy talking back at us.
On one of my last trips to Central Arizona for a lion scouting and calling trip, I found myself, as I often do, in the middle of several gray fox. Because my focus is calling mountain lions, I rarely shoot fox these days. However, I’ve had some newer guys to this predator calling sport ask me to do some educational videos of animals coming to the call. I thought this was an excellent idea.
Arizona Gray Fox
Because my intent is not to harvest a fox, I have the unique opportunity to film the behavior of the animal from the time it arrives to the time it leaves. Also, while I have the fox in the area of the caller, I have the opportunity to use the sounds from my Wildlife Technologies caller to capture and keep the attention of the animal for long periods of time. The result is video that shows people some basic ways to scout for and to call a fox, but the video clips also demonstrate how animals respond to being called and what happens during various sound changes on the caller.
In this video I call in a very vocal fox that comes in fast, stays for a long time, and puts on a great show. (more…)
Holy Mountain Lion Batman! – Why We Scout
We’ve always said that year-round scouting is a critical piece of cougar calling success. This is why we scout – patiently.
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In a previous blog, we posted this scouting video from one of our trail cameras. The video shows a young lion walking down a hard-pan dry wash bottom
We noted right away that this lion was still fairly young and not going to be a ”shooter” for a couple more seasons. However, we thought the area looked promising and this particular drainage should have a more dominant lion in it. We were very right…
