Mountain Lion Photo courtesy Byron Wright New Mexico Cooperative Extension Service

One morning, a mountain lion wandered out of the Organ Mountains and down the bajada, the long slope that connects mountains to valley bottom. Whatever its errand - perhaps it was hunting, perhaps looking for a territory of its own - the mountain lion ended up down in a suburban neighborhood on the edge of Las Cruces. It didn¹t hang around long. By the time an Animal Control officer and an officer from the state Game & Fish Department arrived on the scene, the big cat was gone, headed back towards the mountains.

Mountain lions, also called cougars, pumas, or simply leones, are the second largest cat in the Americas. (Only jaguars are larger.) Full-grown male leones weigh around 160 pounds (females weigh in at about 135 pounds), and measure up to seven feet from nose to the end of their long tail. These big cats were once the most widespread wild cat in the Americas, ranging from Patagonia to Canada, and from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic. These days, mountain lions are much less common, but lion populatio

ns are still healthy in New Mexico because of the rugged terrain and abundant habitat.

These big cats are graceful and formidable hunters. Mountain lions prefer deer or elk, but will eat whatever is available, including animals as small as rabbits or poodles. A leon hunts just like an enormous house cat. It stalks to within a few feet of its prey, then rushes forward in a blur of tawny speed as fast as 40 miles per hour and leaps onto its prey. A mountain lion can cut a deer's spinal cord with a single powerful bite of its large canine teeth. Elk, weighing as much as five times as the big cat, require a different technique. After leaping on the elk's back, the leon grasps the elk's head with its big paws, twists the elk's head around and breaks the elk's neck. Biologists estimate that an adult mountain lion needs a deer a week to survive.

Leones are solitary animals. They avoid other mountain lions, except for brief mating liaisons. Females can come into heat at any time of the year, but spring is most common. The males sleep around, staying with a given female only for the duration of her estrus. About three months after conception, female mountain lions give birth to two or three kittens. The young leones are weaned by six weeks of age, but stay with their mother for 18 months to two years, until they are sexually mature.

Perhaps the mountain lion that wandered down to town was a young one, looking for a territory of its own. (Depending on the density of their prey, mountain lions require 40 to 80 square miles of country to support themselves.) No matter its errand, the leon's appearance reminded us that we live in wild country.