colorado – Page 6 – Five Acres with a View

Hail Storm

This is the biggest sized hail that I’ve seen in a couple of years. Fortunately, when I looked out toward the barn, the other two horses had let Lily (the least pushy of the three) into the barn.

After a hail storm, I am always surprised by the sharp smell of shredded vegetation.

Mountain Lion in Snow

Here, the mountain lion is resting next to its three day old elk kill which has been covered in snow. I took this about 7:35 pm or so.

I was in the mudroom when Jack rushed by me to get to the garage. We have a neighborhood mailing list, and Jack had just received email that there was an elk kill across the road from our house, and that it was being guarded by a mountain lion in the shrub trees behind it. For a while, the only signs of action were birds: mainly magpies, though after a while I started seeing ravens as well. At one point, a very alert coyote wandered up for a snack. Here is a detail from a photo that I took several hours later, after watching the lion run up to the kill to chase off birds. The lion is behind its kill:

I don’t know if it was disturbed by me taking photos but it ran back to the shrub trees to the west back toward the National Forest. (I stayed close to the house, I promise!) Here is the larger photo from which I took the above detail:

I didn’t realize that mountain lions could down elk: I thought they stuck to mule deer and whitetail deer. Another neighbor reported that there was another elk kill a little to the east of us.

When we first moved here, we never saw elk unless we went up into the mountains. When they started coming into our valley, people would park along the road to watch.