Mountain Lion

Rating:
Summary: A book you will be proud to own.
Review: A wonderful book. A joy to read. Rebecca L. Grambo writes well with a sympathetic eye. She discusses these beauties and their plight for survival. The accompanying magestic photos by Daniel J. Cox perfectly match the content from the Author. Since the Nature of Mountain Lions are so shy, I appreciate the wonderful photographs of them in nature which would otherwise be very difficult to photograph. I recommend this book to any cat and animal lovers out there. I hope this book stirrs up the public's interest in saving the Mountian Lion from extinction.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty pictures, but ....
Review: I spent two months last winter in a mountain cabin far up a back road in Washington's Methow Valley, just below the Canadian border and just east of the North Cascade National Park, where there are many cougars. One broke into my nearest neighbor's house and I found fresh tracks one morning beside the road into town. So with all the cougar excitement in the Valley, I decided to learn more about them by reading two recently published softcover books. Either book is a good place to start if you want to know more about the big cats that are becoming a more common part of life throughout the West.

Mountain Lion (Cox and Grambo) is a medium format photo essay of 99 spectacular color photographs of cougars running, jumping, caring for their young, attacking deer and so forth. These remarkable pictures, mostly taken in southwestern red rock country, give a real feel for how the animals move through their territory. After being stunned by the images, I was a little disappointed to read that they were taken "mainly with captive-bred mountain lions under controlled conditions". Well, the cougars LOOK wild and at least none of them are wearing sunglasses or have their kitty litter boxes visible. The brief text is a well-written essay about the cougar's natural history and human interaction, and there is a bibliography.

A book I preferred is Cougar! by Harold Danz. It is a comprehensive historical and natural history coverage of the cats by a retired National Park Service employee. Besides a description of cougar habits and hunting techniques with each of their prey species, interesting chapters describe the human-cougar relationship from Native Americans and Colonial times, through the bounty hunter years and on to the present.

There is a fascinating section in Cougar! that describes all documented cougar attacks, both fatal and non-fatal, in the U.S. and Canada from 1751 through mid-1998. Danz reports that the only fatal cougar attack in the United States between 1909 and 1974, was of a 13-year old boy traveling on snowshoes near Lake Chelan (not far from my winter retreat) in December 1924. When his body was found it was deduced that the young victim had cut off one of the cougar's front claws (!) while unsuccessfully defending himself with a pocketknife. Contemporary cougar fans may find poetic justice in descriptions of two recent non-fatal incidents where National Park campers were forced by cougars to spend the night up in a tree (!) until someone came to their assistance. There is also a description of historic and current cougar populations in each state (Washington, with 2,300, has one of the largest populations) and Canadian province, as well as the exhaustive bibliography you'd expect from a university press.

I really enjoyed Cougar!, and while the grainy black and white photos don't compare with those in Mountain Lion, it is the much more informative and interesting of the two books.

Rating:
Summary: Rating: "A" -- wonderful wildcat photography. Highly recomme
Review: These are the best mountain lion photographs I've ever seen, and
one of the best wildlife-photography books I know of. The text is
competent and well-researched, but the real attraction is Cox's
wonderful photos. If you have any interest in wildcats, you need this
book. Or if you need a gift for a cat-lover ....

Cox photographed mainly captive-bred cats; this is evident only in
the extraordinary intimacy of the photos, such as one of the mother
cat giving birth, and many of appealing blue-eyed, spotted cubs at
play. I'd have liked to know how he took the one where the lion is
leaping straight into the camera. Or the one where it looks like he
was in the same sandstone cave with the lion, in Utah's magnificent
canyonlands. Or the cat in mid-leap over a chasm. Sadly, such details
are conspicuous by their absence; the text is resolutely generic.

But this is quibbling. The photos speak for themselves -- like the cat
who's treed a porcupine, and (next photo, please) gets a snootful of
quills. The publisher's puff copy calls this "the most extraordinary
photographic book on mountain lions ever published." I would
agree, and recommend it highly.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful & Informative
Review: You can judge a book by it's cover. It's just as beautiful inside as it is outside. Very informative and a joy to read. If you love wildlife or any of the big cats, you'll definitely want to add this book to your collection!