The following excerpt from the Summer 2010 issue of Cat Mews gives background information on mountain lions to help promote the release of Montana’s new stamp.
Montana’s Mountain Lions
By Marci Jarvis, Cat Mews editor
Montana’s state animal is the grizzly bear, however, the mountain lion—Felis concolor, ‘cat of a single color’ — is more prevalent. The cat, resting in the snow, is paired with the state flag in part 4 of the Flags of Our Nation series, issued on April 16, 2010.
Each set of ten Flags of Our Nation stamps is sold in coils of 50, with five of each design. The Postal Bulletin describes the stamps as a ‘snapshot of each state.’ Tom Engeman was the artist and Howard E. Paine had the triple role of designer, director of art, and typographer.
According to sources at Montana’s Fish, Wildlife & Parks, about 1800 mountain lions roam in the western section of the state, with “scattered pockets throughout the eastern part.” Wildlife managers use radio collars and “average occupancy rates” to estimate populations.
Mountain lions once brought a bounty in Montana; hunting with dogs has been legal since 1971, while poaching is abhorred. Two hunting seasons close early when the quota is reached. In 2009, more than 300 mountain lions were legally killed as the cats are not “a species of concern”–yet.
Once prevalent throughout the US, North America’s largest feline now roams in only 14 Western states and Florida. Frequent sightings in the Midwest may signal a comeback in those states.
Known as the mountain lion, puma, and cougar in the West; it is called panther, painter (colloquial for panther), and catamount (cat-of-the-mountains) in the East.
Muscular and powerful, this cat can run up to 50 miles per hour.* Males can reach seven to eight feet from head to tail, and weigh up to 200 lbs.
Mountain lions are a reddish-brown, but in colder areas their coat turns a yellow-gray in winter. They have black-tipped ears and tail, a white or beige belly, and white facial markings.
Litters consist of two or three blue-eyed kittens born with a spotted coat and ringed tail to provide needed camouflage.
Prey of choice is most often deer and elk, with an occasional rabbit, but in a pinch, mountain lions—like most cats— will eat whatever rodents or birds are available.
The mountain lion (or panther) is found on more than a dozen U.S. stamps.
Partial List of Sources
*Cougar Fund, http://www.cougarfund.org/conservation.
Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks; http://fwp.mt.gov/wildthings/livingWith Wildlife.
Rodrigues, Amy. Outreach Coordinator, Mountain Lion Foundation (nonprofit), www.MountainLion.org.; P.O. Box 1896, Sacramento, CA 95812.
Reprinted with permission, © Cat Mews, Summer 2010
Marci Jarvis has been editor of Cat Mews, journal of the Cats on Stamps Study Unit, for ten years. The Cats on Stamps Study Unit is a nonprofit organization affiliated with the American Philatelic Society and the American Topical Association. Cat Mews, the award-winning journal, features articles about new cat stamps from around the world: domestic, wild, heraldic, cartoon, and more. Please visit their web site, catsonstamps.org for more information.
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Thought cheetah’s live solely in Africa? Think again- the following article was in a Panthera newsletter and discusses the topic one of the rarest subspecies of cats, nearly as rare as Russia's amur leopards- Iran’s Asiatic cheetahs, and their struggle to save this remnate is a long and hard one:
Saving a Cat That Calls the Iranian Desert Its Home
By Dulcie Leimbach
April 28 -- While the Security Council strategizes to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the United Nations has also been trying to solve another threat within that vast, complicated country: the life of the Asiatic cheetah, the fastest land mammal on earth.
The Asiatic cheetah is a critically endangered member of the cat family that is now relegated to the central plateau of Iran. Its near extinction happened through habitat degradation and disturbance and diminished prey – primarily gazelles. The cheetah once roamed the Middle East and Central Asia up to Kazakhstan, but at its lowest point, a few decades ago, its numbers hit a mere 50 cats subsisting in the rocky, desertlike terrain in the middle of Iran.
More recently, that number may be as high as 100 and relatively stabilized, thanks to the Conservation of the Asiatic Cheetah Project, a partnership between the UN Development Program and Iran’s Department of the Environment. The Global Environment Facility, a group of 181 countries, international institutions, nongovernmental organizations and private entities that supports improvements to the environment, provided $725,000 for the first phase of the project. The Iranian government contributed up to $800,000 in-kind donations.
The UN Development Program and other UN agencies participate in the cheetah project through the Millennium Development Goals and its environmental sustainability component. Other parties that have been involved include the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Cheetah Conservation Fund.
The Asiatic cats “live in remote areas in a big region, so it’s hard to quantify” their actual total, said Luke Hunter, executive director of Panthera, a wild-cat conservation group in New York that is also partnering in the venture. Hunter travels to Iran about once a year for research on the cheetah.
The animal took a turn for the worse after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when conservation work fell by the wayside, and wildlife in general and cheetahs in particular became ever more vulnerable to hunters, who went after the cats for sport and profit as well as to keep them from devouring farmers’ livestock.
Although the more recent governments of Iran and those saving the animal have staved off the animal’s full demise through the creation of national parks and wildlife refuges, the cheetah still confronts a long stretch to revitalization, with the major threats being illegal hunting, overgrazing of its habitat by livestock and significant depletion of its wild prey.
“There’s lots of human impact in the parks” on the cheetah, Hunter said in an interview with UNA-USA. Cheetah prey continues to be hunted illegally for meat, which is sold on the black market, a crime that the government has curtailed to some success. The government has also been buying back private land to protect crucial grazing sites for the cheetahs’ prey, particularly areas with water holes, but that quest is expensive. The bigger challenge is maintaining a large stock of gazelles for the cheetah to thrive on, but gazelles have been hunted to near death, too.
And cheetah sometimes end up as road kill, roaming at night onto the major highways intersecting its territory.
An Invitation to Run
Despite these threats, this arid region is ideal for the athletic cheetah, where the wide-open spaces offer tracks for the animal’s famous 60-mile-an-hour dashes – the last species of a lineage of cats built for such chases. Like a greyhound, it is blessed with long, lean legs, a super-size chest and a waspy waist, as Hunter described the cat’s physique. Its body extends up to two and a half feet long, not including the tail, which acts as a rudder to stabilize the animal when it makes its swift turns toward prey. Besides gazelles, the Asiatic cheetah dines on ibex and urials, killing prey by attacking its throat to suffocate it.
“The cheetahs subsist O.K., but both species of prey – the ibex and urial – are mountain dwellers,” Hunter says. This terrain makes it challenging for the cat to use its high-speed hunting techniques. When the prey moves down the slopes for water or new grass in the valleys, the cheetah seizes the moment.
With a coarse, tawny black-spotted coat, it is not quite as gorgeous and silky as a leopard, yet it carries itself regally. As a symbol of elegance and fleet on its feet, the cat was captured in Asian art for centuries. Maharajas trained them to hunt for gazelles, earning the name “hunting leopard.”
The Cat Project’s Successes
The first phase of the cheetah project, from 2001 to 2008, analyzed the causes undoing the population and made headway in addressing the most serious threats. Preservation sites were upgraded from “prohibited hunting” areas to wildlife refuges and national parks, providing more protection. Project game guards and the government’s own protection force helped secure these regions for the cheetahs and reduce poaching of its prey; fines for cheetah kills are also high. A public-awareness campaign, complete with posters in Farsi, to save the cat helped enlighten Iranians, especially those living in the region where the animal exists.
Indeed, interest in the cat has risen among Iranian researchers, with reports in journals published and a project Web site (cheetah.irandoe.org) publicizing the cheetah’s status. Iran has even instituted an Asiatic cheetah day – Aug. 31, when educational programs and festivals are held mainly around the cheetah habitat.
“Very few experts have been needed to be brought in from the outside,” said B. Murali, a program specialist for the South and West Asia division at the UN Development Program in New York. “The people in Iran working on this are highly qualified and competent.”
Such awareness efforts, however, do not always work. In 2008, a local herder chased a young cheetah and chained it at home but eventually turned it over to the conservationists. Since then, the cub has been living in a large natural enclosure in Miandasht Wildlife Refuge, a 210,000-acre area considered an important cheetah habitat. The cat, called Koshki, will most likely not be released to the wild because of its poor survival skills, but its close monitoring should provide more information on this relatively obscure animal, whose counterpart in Africa has been researched much further.
Little is known, for starters, about the Asiatic cheetah’s ecology, movement patterns, habitat requirements and biology, though Hunter said that in an optimal environment, the cat could breed up to 8 cubs a litter every 18 months. As a shy animal, it steadfastly avoids human contact.
With the project’s approximately $2 million second phase going since January 2009, research will continue on the cheetah through more extensive tagging using collared satellite devices. The goal is to learn such basic information as ranging patterns, habitat preferences and community dynamics. This phase, to last through 2012 and cover a large physical range, will add more guards in national parks and preserves, reinforcing the value of engaging villagers in protecting the cats from illegal hunting and overgrazing.
Big-cat conservation and monitoring, nevertheless, is often a process entailing two to three decades, so the second phase is an “incremental step” that will provide a “blueprint for a fine-tuned approach” to saving the animal, said Mehdi Kamyab, the team leader for the Energy, Environment and Disaster Management Program cluster at the UN Development Program in Tehran.
As Hunter said, saving the Asiatic cheetah is “important for its own sake.”
“It’s a fantastic animal,” he added. “It’s been part of the Persian culture for 2,000 years and deserves to be so for 2,000 more.”
Dulcie Leimbach is the publications director of UNA-USA.
the third part of the story.
here's the last part- not centered around Acadia, but rather the situation that these shelter dogs find themselves in. I did not post these for your pity on these animals because pity can often lead to emotional adoptions by people not yet ready to accept the responsibility of owning a dog: rather, I posted these videos, the third in particular, because I believe that if you are going to buy a dog and invite another into your family, it should not be from a pet store or from a private breeder because your buying those animals creates an obivious demand and the higher the demand the more will eventually end up in the shelters where their chances are not good. Adopt only if you are completly prepared, but I would ask you, please, do not buy from pet stores or private breeders when you are ready for a dog- their lives are not in jeopardy and they do not run the risk of euthanization, but dogs in a shelter are in just that position. I posted these videos because I think it is something people need to know about, and whether or not it directly affects you, it affects them greatly, and so I think that that is reason enough for everyone to know about their predicament.
the second part in the story.
just as it took me a while to understand why her past was awful, it took me years to feel a little guilty about adopting a puppy when the adults that were just as good had much lower chances of getting adopted out. I can't imagine how intimidating a shelter must be to a dog, especially one that had been through such a life already at six weeks of age. I had to anthropomorphize her a little to get the message through, but had she been able to comprehend how close she came to not being alive today, this might be what she would say.
the first of the three part story.
we bought my first dog Acadia when I was ten years old, from a shelter. I met her sister, a much larger, much more affectionate puppy, and there were several others that my parents tried to persuade me to get, older dogs that would have been good for children, but it was as soon as I saw Acadia and heard her story that I resufed to consiter any others. Maybe it was because I was always much more likely to feel affection and compassion for animals and people who came from hard pasts and because of their shy personalities are much less likely to make friends, (or get adopted in this case). It took me years to really understand why her past was so horrible. She was one of three dogs we owned, (now two with the recent death of our ossy) all of which came from the pound, all of which still had lingering problems, but all of which are loved more than I could have ever brought myself to love a perfect puppy from a pet store.
Conservation for animals and earth. Very strong message in video and song together.
Here is another one of Simons cats videos. Tooooo funny!
I still say keep your cat indoors though :)
THERE'S ONLY A FEW THOUSAND TIGERS LEFT IN THE WILD!
Help us protect the tiger!
http://www.endtigertrade.org/
Wild tiger image courtesy of:http://www.tigerawareness.co.uk/
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This guy has some really cute videos on youtube. This one is funny! I see so much of my cats in this too. The meowing also had my cats looking around.
Amazing Grace was reported to be a three-year-old female ocelot when she arrived on 9/27/96, but appears to be much older. Her ears were very tattered because the place where she lived before had cats with common walls; meaning that one wall of the cage was shared between adjoining cats. When Amazing Grace would rub against the wire, the cat next to her would bite off pieces of her ears trying to get a grip on her. She is safe from harm now and has her own large natural enclosure. She is affectionately called Gracie by the volunteers at Big Cat Rescue. Gracie has the boldest personality of all the ocelots. She makes her presence known with her guttural voice and greets everyone with enthusiasm. Gracie is also very high strung and loves attention of all sorts, especially operant training sessions. Gracie gets so excited during training sessions and does not want them to end or the keepers to leave. So when keepers end an operant session they must leave behind some enrichment for her to play with. This way Gracie can keep entertaining herself for as long as she wants.
SPONSOR AMAZING GRACE HERE:http://www.bigcatrescue.org/adopt_a_c...
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!
HELP US SAVE THE TIGER!
Big Cat Rescue is one of 100 small nonprofits who are finalists to win $1,000,000 in an online voting contest sponsored by Chase bank. If we win, funds will be used to support the 100+ cats at the sanctuary, end abuse of big cats in captivity and help save the tiger from extinction in the wild.
Please take a minute to vote for Big Cat Rescue here:
http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommuni...
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Big Cat Rescue's Scott Lope voted Animal Planet's Hero of the Year 2009! A huge THANK YOU to everybody who voted for Scott! We celebrated at Whiskey Joe's, 7720 West Courtney Campbell Causeway
Tampa, FL.
Scott's win means that Big Cat Rescue will be receiving $10,000 to help with our mission and Scott will get a well deserved vacation!
Once again thank you to all the people who voted, our grr-eat volunteers and to all our supporters around the world! WE'RE MAKING A DIFFERENCE!
HAPPY NEW YEAR! :)
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BOBCAT HIT BY CAR & SURVIVES! The bobcat was rescued on 11/30/09 after being netted in a retention pond and transported to FVS - Florida Veterinary Specialists, where the $4000 surgery was performed to repair Bellona's shattered leg. Read the full story and DONATE here: http://bit.ly/7VErLR
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Here Ellen here is the last painting I did. No where near as good as yours. This is the first and last animal picture i did, My best painting were of out door stuff like mountains and lakes and stuff like that. But not bad for my first animal painting. I did that in 1994.
This film premeired at the 2009 Fur Ball and features the rescue of Freckles the liger, Alex and Cookie the tigers, Hope the bobcat and others.
Happy Fall season everyone!!! I painted this picture to enter into the Circleville Pumpkin show. What do you think?
Freckles the LIGER and Alex/Cookie her two tiger companions were rescued from Mississippi in december 2008. The Fur Ball is Big Cat Rescue's largest fundraiser of the year, thanks to everyone who made the event a roaring success, this helps us provide the best care for our cats and helps fund future rescues :)
Cheetahs are the fastest land mammal! Capable of reaching speeds in excess of 70mph they are an amazing animal, unfortunately their numbers in the wild have dropped drastically in the past 100 years.
Namibia is one of the last refuges of the remaining world Cheetah population. A quarter of all the remaining cats are found in Nambia. It is estimated their numbers globally have declined by over 90% in the last 100 years. A local thorn bush species is invading the savannah in the country, causing over US$90 million each year in lost revenue to Namibian farmers, whilst also destroying the native habitat of the fastest of the cats. Now the Cheetah Conservation Fund has pioneered a scheme to clear the thorn bush and turn it into cheap fuel briquettes. The project is creating jobs at the same time as helping to restore the hunting ground of the endangered cheetah.
Vote for the Cheetah Conservation Fund "No Beating About The Bush" at:http://www.theworldchallenge.co.uk/vo...
Voting ends 13th November 2009, you can vote once per e-mail address - remember a vote for the CCF is a vote for the CHEETAH!
Learn more about the Cheetah Conservation Fund and their efforts here: http://www.cheetah.org/
*Special thanks to Paul Garret for supplying footage of wild cheetahs -http://www.youtube.com/user/Chilldogg...
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