[ad_1]
Jun. 12—It’s not one thing you see day-after-day. Actually, it is not one thing I’ve ever seen.
My spouse was operating at Seven Mile Creek Park when she noticed a touch of coloration within the inexperienced woods that jumped out at her. A decomposed deer carcass was stashed in a tree about 5 toes off the bottom.
I went again and located it later, however not earlier than strolling previous it as soon as. It’s only a methods into Trail 3 and about 50 toes off the path.
At least a few others had observed it final week, at the least one calling Stein Innvaer, head of the Nicollet Department of Natural Resources workplace.
I might consider solely three eventualities for a deer in a tree. My first was {that a} cougar stashed it there to feast on later.
The second was {that a} deer might attempt to leap over a limb and get its toes so tangled it could not get out and died. But there did not look like any manner it might have gotten hung up and no cause it will have determined to leap over the limb.
The third was that some youngsters hung it there as a prank to gas hypothesis about cougars. But except they only occurred to discover a useless deer close by, they’d have needed to carry it into the park after which haul it 1 / 4 mile again on the paths. And they did not put it in a spot it was more likely to ever be noticed by anybody. They would have hung it close to a car parking zone or at the least someplace it will rapidly be noticed.
I had a fourth idea — that it was stashed there by Bigfoot — however there are such a lot of Bigfoot doubters, I hate to even point out it.
Fascination with cougar sightings — typically of doubtful nature — have been round for a few years on this space.
The pure vary of cougars, referred to as mountain lions within the West, is within the Black Hills and the western mountain ranges.
But additionally they wander a whole bunch of miles.
The DNR has spent loads of time investigating cougar sightings, most of the time deciding the blurry photograph of one thing within the distance is extra doubtless an enormous home cat or another animal than a cougar.
But there even have been sufficient confirmed sightings within the Minnesota River Valley over time to indicate cougars at the least move via the world. The rugged ravines, water sources and loads of cowl, deer and different meals sources makes the river space a good habitat for cougars.
“We get cougar experiences on a regular basis,” Innvaer mentioned. “They’re very onerous to nail down, however some are very good. There was one in Kilkenny a few years in the past that was very clearly a cougar. It was on a path cam. There was a deer within the foreground and the eyes of a cougar shining within the background and it was clearly a cougar.”
He’s a bit suspicious the carcass within the tree was a cougar stashing a meal and mentioned with no tracks or poop seen within the space, there is no approach to attribute it to a cougar.
Cougars typically do not pull their kills up into timber — that is most typical among the many African cats. Cougars are likely to dig a shallow gap and canopy their kill with branches and leaves to cover it till they return.
But they’ve been identified to take to timber with their meals.
A National Park Service official in Colorado responded to somebody’s query about how the physique of a mule deer bought excessive right into a pine tree: “This will need to have been a mountain lion kill, or an animal that died of different causes, was discovered by a mountain lion, and subsequently eaten. Once the mountain lion had eaten its fill, it cached the rest of the carcass within the tree to maintain it away from coyotes.”
We’ll by no means know for positive how the deer ended up within the tree, however that is OK. It’s good to have mysteries.
Even although we’ve got path cams and drones and monitoring units and all method of scientific data, the good outside proceed to carry loads of unexplained issues.
That’s a comforting thought in a world the place we are able to monitor down the solutions to absolutely anything.
Tim Krohn might be contacted at [email protected] or 507-720-1300.
[ad_2]