Yellowstone Wolf Tracker is a wildlife adventure tour company that has been on ground tracking and observing Yellowstone National Park’s wolf population since their reintroduction in the 1990’s.
Their tours focus on wolves but they are also experts in locating other hard-to-find Yellowstone wildlife including bears and in rare instances mountain lions like this one they managed to film as it weighed its options in steep terrain with a group of mountain goats in close proximity.
Yellowstone’s mountain lion populations fluctuates but a recent survey placed their numbers between 34–42 individuals. Given that Yellowstone covers 3,472 square miles and the big cat’s elusive nature, seeing one is incredibly rare and the chancing of seeing one working out the risk reward equation of hunting prey perched on steep mountainside is vanishingly small.
Mountain goats are famous for their use of cliffs to avoid predation as they are extremely confident in dizzyingly steep terrain where they can comfortably evade predators like bears, wolves and mountain lions. Looks like that strategy won the day for this band of mountain goats and the lion went away hungry.
“Look carefully above the mountain goats to see a cougar stalking them along the mountain side. Our Winter Wolf Watch was lucky enough to get a rare glimpse of this big cat at work but the mountain goats survived in the end by perching on a tall and narrow cliff, leaving no room for the cougar to attack.”
ABOUT YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK MOUNTAIN LIONS:
The cougar (Puma concolor), also known as mountain lion, is the one of the largest cats in North America and a top predator native to Greater Yellowstone. (The jaguar, which occurs in New Mexico and Arizona, is larger.) As part of predator-removal campaigns in the early 1900s, cougars and wolves were killed throughout the lower 48 states, including national parks. Wolves (Canis lupus) were eradicated and, although cougars were largely eliminated from Yellowstone, the species survived in the West because of its cryptic nature and preference for rocky, rugged territory where the cats are difficult to track. Eventually the survivors re-established themselves in Yellowstone in the early 1980s, possibly making their way from wilderness areas in central Idaho.
Prior to wolf reintroduction (1987–1993), Yellowstone National Park’s northern range was occupied year-round by an estimated 15 to 22 cougars, including adults, subadults, and kittens. There were 26–42 cougars estimated after wolf establishment (1998–2005). In 2014, a new study began which seeks to estimate population abundance in the same region using noninvasive genetic-survey methods. Biologists estimated between 29 and 45 individuals resided across the northern portion of Yellowstone (all age and sex classes combined) between 2014 and 2017 (Anton 2020). Currently, population estimation is underway using a remote camera survey grid methodology with preliminary results indicating a stable population since 2017. Since 2016, Global Positioning Collars (GPS) are used to study movements, predation, and population monitoring on 4–7 individuals a year.
While disease and starvation are occasional causes of cougar deaths, competition with other cougars or predators, and human hunting (during legal seasons outside protected areas), are the main causes of cougar mortality. Habitat fragmentation and loss are the main long-term threats to cougar populations across the western United States.
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