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Starred Review "The author's passion and his firsthand knowledge of his subject make the narrative highly readable. . . . A handsome book that is well-balanced, instructive, and authoritative." -- Kirkus Reviews
Vorwort
Autorentext
Jim Williams has spent his entire life finding the wild. Jim left the farm country of Iowa and spent his formative years as a young surf bum turned biology student in the Pacific Beach area of San Diego. He did his undergraduate work at San Diego State and Florida State Universities and his graduate studies at Montana State University in Bozeman. Jim is an award-winning, professionally certified wildlife biologist and has been working for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks for 25 years. Jim studied mountain lion ecology for his Master's Degree on Montana's Rocky Mountain Front and has been working on mountain lion and other wildlife conservation issues in various roles ever since. He has been working with biologists in Chile and Argentina on a variety of wildlife conservation projects. Jim and his wife Melora live and work in Montana's beautiful Flathead Valley just west of Glacier National Park.Joe Glickman was the author of Fearless: One Woman, One Kayak, One Continent (Falcon Guide, 2012), The Kayak Companion (Storey, 2003), and To the Top (Northword, 2003). Glickman's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily News, Newsday, The Village Voice, Outside, Men's Journal, Inside Sports, Adventure Cyclist, Runner's World, US, EcoTraveler, The Paddler, Sea Kayaker, Women's Sports & Fitness, and Brooklyn Bridge. He co-wrote (with Allen Barra) That's Not the Way It Was, a book about myths in sports.A wildlife biologist who studied mountain goats and grizzlies in the Rockies, elephants in Africa, and whales in the world's oceans, Doug Chadwick also writes about natural history, conservation, and wildlife around the world, from right whales in the sub-Antarctic to snow leopards in the Himalayas, producing close to fifty articles for National Geographic magazine. In addition, he has written thirteen books about wildlife and conservation, including The Wolverine Way, Tracking Gobi Grizzlies, Yellowstone to Yukon and the lead chapter in Crown of the Continent: The Wildest Rockies, a photographic celebration of the region's wildlife and scenic majesty.
Klappentext
An Expert's View of the Big Cat's Fight to Find Its Wild
Zusammenfassung
An Expert's View of the Big Cat's Fight to Find Its Wild
Leseprobe
Foreword During the 1980s, wolves trotted south from Canada into neighboring Glacier National Park in Montana and became the first to survive in the US West for half a century. The little colony grew, split, and grew some more. By the early 2000s, offshoots roamed much of the northwestern corner of the state. Many folks were thrilled to have these new-old residents back adding untamed music to the great outdoors. A lot of other Montanans wanted the packs eradicated. Some days, it seemed that about all anybody around here did any more was argue over wolves. On one of those days, a biologist working for Montana's Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks looked out his office window to find the street lined with outraged, placard-waving big game hunters convinced that wolves were going to eat up all the state's elk and deer. That biologist was the regional game manager, Jim Williams. You wouldn't have wanted his job just then. We met to talk not long afterward. It was just a casual chat, but it changed my view of the balance of wild lives in the landscapes around us when he told me, Hardly anyone realizes that there are two or even three times as many cougars as wolves out in those woods and mountainsides. Now, the average cougar is bigger than the average wolf and consumes more wild meat than a wolf does. Cougars occasionally injure or kill humans. Wolves almost never do. Yet here we are dealing with outbreaks of near-hysteria over wolves while we don't hear much at all from the general public about cougars. Why? Mainly because the big cats are so good at not being seen. Also known as the mountain lion or puma, the cougar is a stalk-and-ambush predatora spring-loaded embodiment of stealth. Unlike the wolf, it seldom travels in a group, doesn't conduct nightly choruses, prefers to keep to thick vegetation or broken terrain, readily climbs to find seclusion high among the branches of trees, and often drags its kill away from a conspicuous site to dine in a hidden nook. As if those traits weren't secretive enough, this hunter is mostly active at night and in the twilight hours. Not surprisingly, another common name for the cougar is ghost cat. I first ran into Jim Williams many years ago a dozen miles east of the Continental Divide. He was a graduate student tracking cougars across the windy slopes of the Rocky Mountain Front with the help of radio collars. Although his career as a wildlife biologist led him to work with a variety of different animals, he rarely passed up any opportunity to go off chasing ghosts. Every time we got together, I would start off wondering whether I was going to hear more cougar news, new findings about the ecology of other species, insights about the social and political forces that influence game management, or a tale from his latest backcountry trip to climb one of the area's high summits. Invariably, given his boundless enthusiasm plus a fondness for coffee, every one of those subjectsand moregot covered before he left. The pages of this book deliver much the same Jim Williams high-octane combo of science, adventure, and conservation. But here the mix is all related to his decades-long pursuit of a special interest in cougars, with each chapter uncovering more aspects of the lives the big cats work so hard to conceal. Of all the large mammals in the western hemisphere, this feline, Puma concolor, is the most widespread. Its distribution extends from Canada's southern Yukon Territory all the way to Argentina and Chile. And in the second half of the book, Jim takes us to that far southern range as he joins researchers in ecosystems where the cougars' neighbors include ocelots, maned wolves, guanacos, vicunas, and condors. In North America, we think of cougars as being tied to the mountains and canyons out West. For the most part, they are. However, two centuries ago, their range sprawled from coast to coast. Cougars were exterminated from most of it by government-supported campaigns that relied heavily on poisoned baits. Harder to find than wolves and grizzlies, the last cats left in remote and rugged terrain escaped the continuing persecution aimed at those other large predators. Then, as the decades passed and attitudes toward meat-eating wildlife changed, cougar numbers started to rally across the western states. Puma concolor being the creature you don't know is there treading whisper-soft in the shadows, the resurgence of this major predator through the late twentieth century never got much attention, but it stands as one of the most remarkable wildlife comebacks in US history. The party may just be getting started. Because adult cougars are fiercely territorial, young animalsespecially malesapproaching sexual maturity are forced out of fully occupied ranges. This pressure disperses cats far and wide in search of new homes with suitable cover, abundant prey, and, with luck, a mate. Some find their needs met in rural and suburban habitats where adaptable species such as white-tailed deer, raccoons, and wild turkeys provide ready meal…