Hey, it's Wes. I just binged this new true crime podcast called Someone's Hunting Us, and I think you're gonna like it too. Someone's Hunting Us is deeply reported, and it gets you inside the mind of a serial killer, this nerdy and polite young man who targets his victims on dating apps and the streets, and he carries around this kill kit he uses to cover his tracks. Someone's Hunting Us is riveting, and it kind of reminds me of season two of The Unforgotten, where no one noticed the worst serial killer in Dallas history because all the victims were elderly women that society just didn't care that much about. The killer in Someone's Hunting Us preys on young women in New Jersey, and there are so many missed opportunities to catch this guy, until the victims and their friends take matters into their own hands. Someone's Hunting Us is from the same journalist behind the hit podcast Father Wants Us Dead, Part thriller, part investigation, it's the story of a serial killer you've never heard of and the women who took him down. Check out Someone's Hunting Us, wherever you listen. When I talked to filmmaker Ben Masters in the last episode, he really nerded out about mountain lions. I enjoyed our chat a lot because I like nature's stuff and I especially love hearing about cougars. At the same time, I realized that The Unforgotten is a true crime podcast, and there wasn't a whole lot of crime happening in that episode. And to be perfectly honest, there is precisely zero crime committed in this bonus episode. This one is all about lions. We are getting even nerdier about their super cute cubs, how their moms protect them, and what we still don't know about these ghosts of the wild. Let's get it started. This is the Unforgotten Season 6 Killsight. I'm your host, Wes Ferguson, and this is a bonus episode. Cougar Bebop. I'd like to talk about mountain lions. Not mountain lion politics or mountain lion controversy. I want to talk about what they do on a daily basis, if that's all right. Please do. So, whenever a mountain lion is born, they're like a little Labrador puppy size. They're all spotted. They'll live in a natal den for about two weeks or so, and their mom will move them to a new spot. And they're very reliant on their mothers, especially as a newborn. They've got to drink milk, obviously. their mammals. And then whenever they're eight weeks or so, they'll begin traveling with mom to her different kill sites. So the life strategy of a lioness is to have food and provide for her family. And depending on where they're at, their prey is going to differ. In South Texas, it's primarily deer, javelinas, pigs, and then foxes, coyotes, raccoons, turkeys, really anything that they can catch and eat. West Texas you get into odd javelinas mule deer white deer but they very opportunistic animals And a female lion they make a kill which is very hard Our film team has spent several hundreds of days filming mountain lions in the wild. and we have documented about 40 predation attempts, a mountain lion trying to kill an ungulate. Of those 40 predation attempts that we have filmed, we have successfully filmed a mountain lion kill a mule deer in Utah and we have successfully filmed a mountain lion and her three sub-adults kill three feral hogs out of a little sounder of pigs. So of the 40 predation attempts, we've seen two successful ones. So it is very, very difficult to sneak up on an animal that is larger than you are, that is very highly evolved to avoid being predated on, and then to jump on its back and then to avoid getting knocked off or beat up and to successfully be able to hold on to that prey and then kill them from asphyxiation. They clasp their jaws over the windpipe and they asphyxiate their prey. They choke them out. The mule deer that we filmed get killed, it went from alive and sleeping in its bed to being dead in maybe 10 minutes. It's one of the fastest, most swift deaths in the natural world. So once a lioness, once they kill their prey, they'll then go back to where their kittens are. and then they'll call. It's almost like a bird chirp. It's like, it's loud. And it can travel, you know, across canyons. It can go several miles. Oftentimes, they'll do it at night whenever it's kind of calm. And the kittens will hear that whistle, and then they'll come and they'll rendezvous with mom. And then they'll go and they'll feed on the carcass. Depending on the temperature, depending on the size of the carcass, depending on the size of the kittens. Sometimes they'll stay on a kill site for two to three days. Sometimes they'll stay on a kill site for 20 days, especially in the wintertime. And if it's below freezing and if it's a large animal, like an elk, they can camp on a carcass for weeks and just sit there and eat it down. And it's amazing how much a mountain lion will eat. They will really eat it down to where there's nothing left. Sometimes. But whenever the prey item begins to diminish, maybe halfway, maybe a third of the way gone, or two-thirds of the way gone, they'll begin to hunt again. Mom will begin to hunt again. So her job is to keep food on the table for the kittens. So she'll kill, they'll eat, they'll get close to getting done eating, and then she'll go out and hunt again. And sometimes they'll go days without successfully hunting. And then as they traveling through that landscape and they hunting you know larger prey like deer or javelina or feral hog they come across a lot of smaller stuff that is never accounted for in any of the research because it doesn't pick up on the cluster sites. They kill a lot of foxes. They kill a lot of coyotes. They kill a lot of jackrabbits, quail, all sorts of different stuff. They're cats. They see something that they can eat, and they'll pounce on it and eat it. And interestingly, one of the mountain lions that we filmed, the collared cat in New Mexico, kind of on the east side of the Aldo Leopold wilderness, we followed her for, gosh, like five months or so. And she definitely killed mule deer, but she was killing about three to one coyotes to mule deer. but you would have never seen those coyote kills in a traditional research because traditionally whenever a mountain lion kills something it'll make these gps pings in one spot for like five days and then the researchers go there and they see what it is well they're only going to give a cluster for four or five days if it's a large animal and those researchers are missing all of the animals that the mountain lion kills and eats for an hour or two hours. And that's one of the big mysteries around mountain lions is what is their effect on these meso predators like coyotes, foxes, raccoons, and other animals that eat fawns, that eat quail eggs, skunks, like all sorts of stuff that they'll eat. And there's a lot that we don't know that we'll hopefully understand with time. So mountain lions, the mothers, their kittens will grow. She'll feed them. Mortality is pretty high for kittens. Normally they'll have three. The average is three. Normally only two make it to dispersal age. They're very reliant on their mom all the way until they're about two years old. But at around 14 to 16 months or so, they'll begin spending a lot of time alone. They'll begin trying to hunt by themselves. They'll begin kind of just spending more time exploring around their territory and poking around by themselves. But mom will kill and she'll go up on top of the hill and she'll do her call, bring the kittens in. And they'll do that for their whole lives. Even as an adult, you'll see a lot of carcass sharing between different generations where there'll be the grandmother, her daughter, and then her granddaughters all at a kill site, all sharing. You'll see it with males as well, where a father will kill and then he'll share that kill with some of the females within his territory. So they're more social than a lot of people give them credit for. They just don't run around in prides like the African lions do. So, you know, whenever they get to be about two years old or so, the female kittens will often set up a home territory inside of the mother's territory or adjacent to or nearby. And then the males will disperse. They don't want to breed with their siblings or with their mom. plus that dominant tom that is living inside of that area is going to kick any competitive males out So those two males that get kicked out those are our big primary dispersers that go into strange places like Frisco or East Texas or they had one that traveled all the way from Salt Lake City to Denver in like two months, swam across Flaming Gorge Reservoir. It's nuts. So that's kind of just a little bit about mountain lion biology. An old cat will live to be like eight or nine years old. So the females will have, if they're lucky, three or four litters. And then, you know, the males, their life strategy is much different than the females. You know, they're not involved in the parental care, but their job is to defend that territory from any other males that may come in and then kill their offspring in order to mate with that female so in some ways one could argue that a mountain lion's population size is a little bit self-stabilizing naturally because of that kitten mortality but we don't really know that for sure because of honestly lack of lack of research there's really not that many unhunted mountain populations in the United States where you could do like a detailed research on natural stabilization of the population. But the male's goal is to establish a territory, have one, two, maybe three females inside of it, and then pretty much provide security for those cats so that those females can raise the cubs, his offspring will then go out and do their thing and he'll remate with those females. Interestingly, in many studies, the females tend to hunt larger prey than the males. You know, their life strategy is different. Their goals are different. They've got to share more. They've got to share with their kittens. Whereas with the male, they're covering country. You know, snack on that javelina maybe a day or two go check on that female go over there you know kill a fawn eat it for a day or two go over here eat a bobcat for a day or two and just kind of bebop around all of their country so they're super fascinating animals and there's a lot that we don't know about mountain lions and that to me is really exciting especially as a filmmaker we know where their GPS data is. We know where they were. We know their home range sizes. We know a little bit about their diet. But the behavioral aspect of mountain lions, I think is really, really cool. And they're incredibly fascinating to me. Thank you for listening to The Unforgotten. To dig deeper into the story and see photos, case files, and more, check out our newsletter at unforgottenpod.com. The Unforgotten is a Free Range production. Season 4, Killsight, was produced here at Free Range in association with the Dallas Morning News. Editing by Aislinn Gattis. Sound design and audio engineering from Austin Sisler with Eastside Studios. Charlie Scudder and I are executive producers. Special thanks to Morgan O'Hanlon. Don't forget, unforgottenpod.com. See you soon. you
