Mountain Lion , by Rebecca L. Grambo, photos by Daniel J. Cox. Television has radically changed our relationship with the rest of creation. By bringing us tightly framed close-ups of elephants and eagles, and by compressing the essential events of an animal s life into a few minutes, television gives us a false sense of communion. Ignorant of the artifice, viewers have come to expect a kind of drop-in informality with wild creatures. That becomes an issue when we consider the mountain lion, a species just about unmatched in its desire for privacy.
People live all their lives in cougar country and never see one.
Those who do, report a tawny blur, a tail disappearing into the brush, a mere fragment of encounter. At least 39 books about mountain lions have come out in the last decade, triple the output of the 1980s. The increased number is doubtless due in part to heightened concern for both humans and lions as urban expansion devours lion habitat, and in part to the migration of nature publishing from New York City, where lions are extinct, to new regional publishers in the West, where lions survive. All of these books have to deal with the problem that few people ever see a wild lion. Two recent arrivals take opposite approaches to the problem.