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Camouflage Cougar My first and only encounter with a cougar happened at about 9:30 a.m. in early May 1996. I was in a meadow at the end of Third Vermilion Lake in Banff National Park trying to get close enough to two adult coyotes to photograph them. While sneaking through the grass edging closer and closer to the coyotes, I began to notice that they were paying a lot of attention to something over to my left. I glanced over quickly, then did a double-take as I realized that there was a cougar hunkered down in the grass about fifteen metres away. Without thinking of anything really, and with my heart pounding, I slowly put down my tripod, edged my camera lens over to point in the general direction of the cougar, then snapped a shot. I was so sure the cougar was going to go bounding off that I hadn't even taken the time to look through the viewfinder before I took the photo. That first photograph turned out to be a lovely dark out-of-focus blob, but fortunately, the cougar actually scrunched down even further into the ground and closed its eyes. This time, I was able to get in two more photographs before the big cat moved back into the brush. Within hours of my sighting, park wardens discovered that the cougar had an elk carcass stashed behind the rock on the left of the photo, resulting in the temporary closure of the trail leading up to the meadow for several days. |
