Chances are most people have seen — or at least heard about — the now viral video of a Utah man who went for a run in a Provo canyon and ended up finding himself face to face with a very angry mama mountain lion.
For six tense and profanity-laced minutes, Kyle Burgess kept filming with his cellphone as he backed away from the cougar, sometimes cussing and other times telling her she needed to go back to her babies, which he had inadvertently stumbled upon on a trail.
“I don’t feel like dying today,” Burgess says at one point in the video posted to his Instagram account.
(Note: He’s OK but had to traverse the same area of the encounter to get back to his car, according to an interview in the Deseret News.)
But, to be clear, this was not a mountain lion on the prowl but a mother protecting her young and making it clear to an unwelcomed visitor in her territory that it was time to get (we can only imagine she would have added a certain expletive here) out, as John “Griff” Griffith, a local naturalist and guide for California State Parks attests to in a recent Facebook video post about the misconception.
“I know a little something about mountain lions,” he says, while taking many a media outlet to task for labeling her behavior as “stalking” in a riff that skirts the conspiracy theory line of why that happened. “That was not a mountain lion stalking. That was a mama mountain lion trying to get someone away from her cubs. There is a difference.”
Griffith notes that Humboldt County is mountain lion country — panning to a shot of Humboldt Redwoods State Park where he says he sees their tracks — but even though they are around us all the time, the likelihood is most people will never see one. And that is the way they like it.
Mountain lion attacks are very rare, he says, and if it’s going to happen, it will be stealthy, not be with the paw-pounding display the Utah cougar put on for Burgess.
“They are going to attack you usually from behind,” says Griffith, a popular producer of videos about the North Coast parks, who himself went viral in the past with a posting of him dancing with California Conservation Corp crew and hosted the online show Wild Jobs for Animal Planet.
That was the case of former Fortuna resident Jim Hamm, who made international headlines after he barely survived a 2007 attack that occurred during a hike with his wife Nell in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, where she fought off the mountain lion with a pen and a branch.
Jim Hamm died a year ago this week of pancreatic cancer. He was 82.
Griffith says he’s only seen a mountain lion a handful of times, but if you do encounter one, there are basic rules to follow, including make yourself seem as large as possible, make noise, keep eye contact and slowly create space away from the animal. Never run away.
In that regard, Griffith says Burgess did just about everything right.
“The only thing he did wrong was not having a partner,” he says.
For more information on mountain lions, Griffith suggests visiting mountainlionfoundation.org and cougarconservancy.org.
This article appears in Maze of Measures.
I heard a mountain lion screaming like a woman being brutally assaulted when I was about 7 while camping in Red’s Meadows, California. So the next time I heard it about 20 years later in the middle of the night at our ranch on Cypress Mountain, California I did not have to go outside to rescue the poor woman like my wife wanted me to. Literally the next day we began seeing lions come down a trail from higher up the mountain occasionally. Several months after the first sighting I was driving out our driveway which was cut into the hillside and a teenage mountain lion leaped across the road right in front of my Subaru wagon heading downhill. I slammed on the brakes and grabbed my Nikon off the passenger seat hoping for a glimpse of it running away. As I passed in front of my car I came to the edge of the road and the young beast crouched behind a thistle bush there not more than three feet away. We were both pretty shocked and as I bolted over the hood of my car like a TV detective I caught a glimpse of the cat bounding into the chaparral below me. No pictures were taken. Later in life I saw three jaguars at different times in different countries and got a picture of one of them in Miskitia. They were far bigger than any wild mountain lion I ever saw.
Thank goodness he did not have a gun, or there would have been orphaned cubs out there.
I told you the minute I saw the lion video, didn’t have to watch but 30 sec of it, the animal was in a defensive mode. She was protecting her young. I have been around a lot of mountain lions.
I have been miraculously lucky to have spotted five mountain lions in my lifetime. My father who worked for the U.S. Forest Service as a 40 year employee was unable to document a single sighting.
My first sighting was an adult mountain lion drinking water from the Trinity River below our house in Willow Creek in the 1970’s. The second sighting was twin cubs near Sims Mountain on the Lower Trinity Ranger District. The third sighting was driving down upper Fickle Hill Road near Arcata as it ran in front of my truck and the last sighting was amazingly on Highway 101 near Westhaven. I thought it was a Great Dane until I saw the tail.
This idiot made the first really stupid decision by not running away when he first saw bobcat babies but instead he went to go take a video of them. WE NEED TO LEAVE WILDLIFE ALONE. Turn my stomach when he said something about when he had his gun. Stay away from wildlife and bad things won’t happen. Now this guy’s getting his little 15 minutes of fame for being an a****** to this poor mama bobcat who was only trying to protect her babies. Humans are so selfish and ignorant.
I’ve only seen one wild mountain lion – when it bounded across the road in front of my truck when driving Forest Service Roads south of Burnt Ranch. Another time I was camping in my SUV in the headwaters of Bluff Creek when I heard a mountain lion “scream” just outside my car – telling me this was his/ her country and that I wasn’t welcome. I dislike when videos like this guy’s go viral and give a distorted view of mountain lions and some idiot a few minutes of fame. He should have turned around and gone the other way immediately.
I worked for the Forest Service 45 years and was lucky enough to see 7 mountain lions while in the safety of a vehicle. I often stop and wonder with all the time I spent doing wildlife biology work in the woods, often alone, how many times I was observed by one. I was once “chased” by a black bear sow who was 150 feet down a steep clearcut as her cubs scurried up a tree. I stood tall, raised by hands and huffed and yelled at her and she turned around. I had another closer bear encounter. We were working in a brushy clearcut where the brush had been crushed in prep for a later prescribed burn, looking for evidence of woodrat nests. A co-worker was working above us above a road and spooked a bear. According to him, the bear vaulted across the road and then headed, running, downhill toward us, it passed us about 6 feet away, bouncing off the cut brush as it bounded downhill, as surprised as we were.