Mountain Lion, Warbler Pond, Los Alamos NM (9/14/2015 5:54 am)

After setting up my DLSR phototrap all summer and entering into fall, I still hadn't gotten a single photo of a cougar. Just the week before, Gowri has asked how much longer I was going to try which was a reasonable question considering that driving over to my parents house every morning and evening and setting up the camera took about 40 minutes out of every day. I would stop by my parent's place before work and would ask my mother if she'd seen flashes go off the previous night. She could see Warbler Pond from her bedroom window so she could see the occasional flash if she was awake. There was nothing special about the morning of September 14 when I checked the Camera Trap. As I scrolled through the pictures on the camera, I couldn't believe that a cougar cub had walked onto the red bridge next to warbler pond right before sunrise! On Sept 30, 2014, a large male cougar had visited and this was defintely not the same one. It took the cougar less than 30 seconds to walk right past the pond resulting in three shots with only this picture being a good one. The others were too close to the camera resulting in out of focus shots with very little of the cougar in the frame. Unfortunately the cougar had approached not from the canyon but from the other side. All other previous visits that were captured by the critter cam always resulted in the cougar stopping to take a drink. But this time the cub didn't stop. I was very happy that I did get this high resolution picture with great detail that was far better in sharpness and resolution to all the previous critter cam shots. But I was also quite disappointed since if this visit was like the previous cougar visits, I would have gotten many more photos. There were three possibilties: 1) the cougar was simply not thirsty (bobcats often walk by on the bridge without stopping), 2) the flash from the Canon 7D DSLR is much more powerful/frequent and spooked the cub resulting in walking right by, 3) maybe there have been other visits where the cougar walks right by but the critter cam didn't react quickly enough to take any pictures whereas my DSLR phototrap is much faster and will capture even short visits like this one. My hope was that now the cougar had seen the pond, he/she may return for a drink in the weeks to come. However, since cougars cover lots of territory and plenty of water sources exist, I wasn't very confident that this would happen. Especially since of all the other cougar visits recorded at Los Pueblos (5 other visits over the last 3 years we've been setting up cameras) never resulted in multiple visits. In fact, visits typically were at least 3 months apart, less than 5 minutes long and its not clear the same cougar visited! I had read that if a cougar makes a successful kill of a large animal like a deer, they'll hang around an area for several days since they bury their kill and return to the kill to feed on consecutive days. If they don't have a kill stashed nearby they continue their long patrol of their territory with males having larger territories than females.