Puma

Pumas eat meat.

They mostly catch deer. A puma hides its food under leaves. It comes back to eat more later.

Pumas are carnivores. In Yellowstone National Park they mostly hunt elk, especially young ones, and deer, plus smaller animals such as marmots. In other places they catch whatever large prey is common.

A puma creeps quietly close to its prey, then leaps onto its back. After a big meal, it hides the rest by dragging it away and covering it with leaves and soil. In Yellowstone, a puma spends about three or four days eating one elk or deer, then four or five days hunting for the next.

Pumas take mainly large hoofed prey, in Yellowstone chiefly elk (mostly calves) and mule deer, supplemented by smaller mammals such as marmots. The hunt is a stalk followed by a short leap onto the prey's back and a powerful bite at the base of the skull or the throat.

Large kills are cached: Animal Diversity Web reports carcasses dragged up to 350 meters and buried under leaves and debris. The National Park Service reports that Yellowstone cougars spend about three to four days feeding on an elk or deer and four to five days hunting for the next.

Pumas live alone.

They are very shy, so people hardly ever see them. They leave scratch marks on the ground to talk to other pumas.

Pumas are solitary and very secretive. Even in Yellowstone National Park, where scientists study them, they are seldom seen. Each puma has a large home range: females often use about 140 square kilometers and males about twice as much.

Pumas communicate with scrapes, piles of soil and leaves scraped up with their back feet and marked with scent. Grown males defend their areas, and the oldest resident males are usually the fathers of most kittens.

Adults are solitary and territorial. Animal Diversity Web gives female home ranges of about 26 to 350 square kilometers (average about 140) and male ranges of about 140 to 760 (average about 280), with densities from about one puma per 13 to one per 85 square kilometers depending on prey.

Scrapes serve as visual and scent signals that let pumas find mates and space themselves out. In unhunted populations such as Yellowstone's, the longest-resident males are dominant and sire most litters, and adult males may kill rival males. Wolves can kill young or sick pumas, and in Yellowstone the two predators hunt similar prey and wolves sometimes take over cougar kills.

Pumas are not rare.

But they need big wild places to live. People can help by keeping wild land connected.

Pumas are listed as Least Concern, because they still live across a huge area. But their numbers are going down in many places. As roads, towns and farms spread, their wild land is broken into smaller pieces.

The National Park Service says habitat loss and fragmentation are the main long-term threats in the western United States. Wildlife crossings over or under highways, and keeping wild areas linked together, help pumas move safely and find mates.

The IUCN Red List (2014 assessment) lists the puma as Least Concern but with a decreasing population trend. In the western United States the National Park Service identifies habitat fragmentation and loss as the main long-term threats, and the eastern population survives only as the small Florida panther group.

Because pumas range so widely, they need connected landscapes: corridors and highway crossings reduce road deaths and genetic isolation. In Yellowstone, monitoring with remote cameras and GPS collars has found the northern-range population stable since 2017, a reminder that protected areas can support healthy numbers.