Months ago I ran into an elderly lady wearing a mumu at Village Creek Natural Historic Area who told me about her encounter with a cougar. This encounter made the local news.It seemed plausible that a creature that preferred living in the wild might follow the banks of the Trinity River in the D/FW urban zone.
An implausible cougar story is in the Seattle news today. A 2 1/2 year old male cougar weighing 140 pounds was captured in Seattle's Discovery Park around 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning, after the cat was treed by hunting dogs.
The cougar was tranquilized, fitted with a GPS collar, which will track his whereabouts twice a day, caged, then released back into the wild at an undisclosed location.
Discovery Park is an island of green surrounded by urban development on 3 sides and the Puget Sound on the 4th side. How did this cat get to Discovery Park? How did it get across the Ballard Locks if it came from the north? How did it get across Lake Washington if it came from the east? How did it get past downtown Seattle if it came from the south? It's very perplexing.
Methinks this may be a coordinated cougar invasion of the Seattle Metropolitan area. Saturday evening there was another cougar incident. A driver ran into and killed a cougar on a Redmond road. Redmond is east of Seattle, on the east side of Lake Washington, where Microsoft is headquartered. It seems the logical source of the cougar invasion would be the Cascade mountains to the east. I wonder how many more cougars have left the mountains to move to the Big City?
