L is for Lion
.
Mountain Lion
.
Not the thing
but a way of saying it
how a cat moves
.
like oil smoothed
.
golden treacle
stretching
down the tin
.
small, fastidious
waves lapping
.
the first dark
splashes of rain
on pebbles
.
the slow
wind of water
from a tap
.
light flickering
through grass
.
as a dream disappears
through the forest
.
Liz Brownlee
.
Mountain lions live in North America and have many names – cougar, puma, panther, catamount… but they are all the same animal.
As people settled in North America and started to farm it was inevitable that this predator would come into conflict with farmers, and although their territory once stretched form the Canadian Yukon to the Straits of Magellan, nowadays they are confined to 14 western states where there is room to support them and one small part of Florida, where they are endangered.
They eat any mammal prey but usually deer.
Although people fear them, they are very shy and solitary (they hate intruders on their patch) and rarely come into contact with humans. About 4 people a year are killed by them.
Contrast this with dogs, that killed about 30 people in the United States last year.
Or humans themselves – hunters shot 1,000 people by accident in the United States and Canada last year and 100 of those died.
Mountain lions are very beautiful.
.
All material © Liz Brownlee
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- Posted in: A-Z Challenge 2013
- Tagged: A-Z Blog, animals, art, endangered, Lion, nature, poetry, science, sustainability, writing
lizbrownlee - poet 
Those are some really interesting statistics. I love big cats of all kinds.
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I have never seen the name catamount before – where is that used? Lovely picture as usual.
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In parts of America – it is short for ‘cat of the mountain’. although in fact it has other territories as well.
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It seems like the rarer it is for a certain animal to attack a human, the more frightened of it we seem to be. That drawing (?) of the mountain lion is mesmerizing.
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Thank you Jocelyn! I don’t do much art any longer, these pictures have been painted very quickly done with a mouse and photoshop. The poetry’s the thing!
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