Thursday, March 29, 2007
Another sane person from Floyd hears a mountain lion
Bill Cochran
Recent mail
Our older boys got flashlights and hopped in the cars to go along the road thinking someone must have wrecked and were pinned in a car down there.
The screams came every minute or so, haunting things to hear. We called the neighbors across the road and they heard the screams, too. So we called 911 and the sheriff’s department sent some deputies out to check with their spotlights. One of them heard the scream, but it was getting farther away, so we knew it had to be an animal. They determined it must have been a cougar or mountain lion. They said that they had received a call from the southern end of Floyd County a year or so earlier, with the same report that sounded like a woman screaming for help.
We checked on line for animal sounds and sure enough found a file for a cougar that was almost identical to what we heard. We read up and learned what we could about these elusive cats, and warned the children to be very cautions about where they were at dusk and after dark, just to be safe. Although it is unlikely that any of them will ever encounter a mountain lion, better safe than sorry, as far as I’m concerned.
We’d never heard the sound before and haven’t heard it since. But we have encountered some decent size cat prints in the snow not far behind a set of deer tracks. The prints were big enough to make us think twice about wanting to have livestock.
ROSE BOWEN, Pilot
BILL: I like your article, “Senate bill draws line in the sand for hunters.” It hits dead center in the 10 ring.
I hunt on 600 acres of private land in Craig County. This land was once under one ownership. In the early '30s, it was divided in half. In the late '80s one of the tracts was divided again. Now this 600 acres of land is owned by four owners. I am lucky to still have permission to hunt.
Your article makes a good point about the age of our hunting population. I will be 59 this July and I do not cover the ground like I did when I was 20. We are not getting any younger. Our younger hunters are shrinking in numbers at an alarming rate.
Younger hunters do not have the time or money to allow them to enjoy what you and I do. My stepson is a great example. He only gets two weeks vacation. He spends one week with his wife and two children at the beach. The other week is spent over the holidays. I have offered to pay for his hunting license and let him use one of my guns. Even with this offer he says he can not justify the time from his wife and sons. I feel he is not alone.
Opening hunting season on a Saturday was a step in the right direction taken by the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. I feel they need to add a second week of black powder hunting to the season west of the Blue Ridge and provide more opportunities for doe hunting.
The worst thing to happen to all hunters west of the Blue Ridge was the lost of the Westvaco land in the Eagle Rock area. This 40,000 acres of land should have been purchased by the state of Virginia, not a land dealer from out of state. I hunted grouse on a lot of that 40,000 acres in my 20s and 30s. I can’t hunt it anymore because it has been subdivided into both large and small private tracts. DIGF officials were too busy having a good time at our expense during the time of the land sale.
As for the national forest, you are dead on about timber cutting, or the lack of the same. I can not find a grouse in the national forest these days. All of the one-time good habitat has grown up. As we both know, grouse do not live in mature wood plots. They may pass through on occasion, but they don’t call them home. Tree huggers have killed more grouse in the last 20 years than any good dog and hunter could have if they killed six or eight a day every day of the season. The only half-decent grouse populations exist on private lands that recently have been clear cut.
AL MILTON
