The sky over South America’s rain forest was turning that hard-to-describe color it gets right before the tropical night erases the color. Then, suddenly and silently, there the puma was! It had warily stepped into a forest clearing and stopped in its tracks.
For a moment the big cat stood motionless, except for the tip of its tail, which kept moving like a low-speed windshield wiper. Then, when it noticed that it was being watched, the puma leapt across the clearing and dashed into the forest with lightening speed
Bundle of Muscles
Because of its plain, tawny color, the puma may remind you of a lioness. Long and sturdy hind legs cause its rump to be higher than its shoulders. Those powerful legs give this 130-pound [60 kg] bundle of muscles the booster power to blast off the ground like a rocket. Pumas have been seen to leap vertically to a height of 18 feet [5 m] in one big jump. That’s like pole-vaulting without bothering to use a pole!
When jumping down, the puma is equally impressive. It has been known to make flying jumps to the ground from a height of 60 feet [18 m]. This is nearly twice the height of platforms used by Olympic platform divers, but the puma doesn’t have the benefit of a filled swimming pool below. Even so, the cat hits the ground ready to bound away as if it had landed on a trampoline.
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When the first colonists settled in the New World, the puma’s range spanned the entire continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It made a living in mountains, swamps, prairies, and jungles alike. Though hunters and farmers have now eliminated the puma from many parts of North America, it remains the all-American cat, still wandering from Canada to the tip of South America. If you measure the success of an animal by the extent of its geographic distribution and the diversity of its habitat, then the puma must be the most successful native American mammal today. The secret of its success?
The puma is well equipped for survival. It has a sturdy stomach and uses varied hunting methods. It can adjust to almost any kind of local food. “It is able to kill and drag an animal five times its size, but it also eats grasshoppers if nothing else is around,” says a veterinarian who has examined the stomach contents of several pumas killed in Brazil. “When it comes to food, the puma is more versatile than any other species of cats.”
Diverse food also calls for diverse hunting skills. Grabbing, let’s say, a bird requires a different tactic from pouncing on a deer. How does the puma do it? In Brazil’s Atlantic forest, it attracts the tinamou by imitating the bird’s call. “A perfect imitation,” says one observer. “The tinamou calls only a few times, but the puma whistles on—10 or 20 times.” Nevertheless, it works. The tinamou thinks a noisy male bird has invaded his territory and decides to step forward and confront his rival—a fatal move.
Whether you search for the puma in North, Central, or South America, it manages, for the most part, to stay out of sight—like the air, omnipresent but invisible. The adjectives most often used by researchers studying the puma are “secretive, elusive and wary.” After killing about 70 pumas, one hunter admitted that “he had never seen one of his victims before the dogs had driven it up a tree.” No wonder frustrated researchers have called the cat “maddeningly elusive”!
What an amazing animal. A wonderful work of nature.
