WATCH: Mountain Lion Boldly Runs in Front of Car in Poudre Canyon
Mountain lions never run in front of cars, or do they? Check out the dashcam of this mountain lion running in front of my father-in-law's car yesterday in the Poudre Canyon.
I have lived all over Colorado for the last 40 years and I have never seen a mountain lion. So how is it, that he could be so lucky as to see one so close? And lucky for us, he had his dashcam on. This video was caught just West of Mishawaka Amphitheatre off of Stove Prairie Road.
The video is 6 seconds of rarity. Rare as in you don't normally see mountain lions dart in front of cars. Not rare in the fact that there are a lot of mountain lions in Colorado. According to Colorado Parks and Wildlife, there are between 3,000 and 7,000 mountain lions in our state.
The National Wildlife Federation confirms that mountain lions, panthers, pumas, and cougars are all the same species, falling under the puma concolor. They also shared that mountain lions are "listed in dictionaries under more names than any other animal in the world." A story about cougars on the Smithsonian Magazine website tells the story about cougars being called "ghost cats" in the 1930s.
Up the road, watch two moose play on the ski slopes.