Re(3): (no subject) IP: 68.172.220.212 Posted on February 5, 2015 at 01:45:29 PM by Chris
Weather,
If you've got one good track, keep going. When we've cold-tracked (not following up sightings) out west, most days we find cougar tracks in a couple hours, or less (sometimes in just 5-10 minutes), 100s of good, clean tracks in a half-mile, with scrapes and scat all along the way. Carnivores hang out near kill-sites for days. If you can't ID the killer from the kill:
You know a surgical chest opening is a bobcat or a cougar.
If the fur is plucked, it's a cat, depending on the width of the pluck, bobcat or cougar.
Debris scraped over the carcass is a cat.
If the fur's a mess and the carcass looks hacked at, it's probably something else. There should be scat latrines and bedding sites (with fur) near the carcass by whoever's been feeding, and tracks everywhere. Examine the ground well around the site.