Monday, January 16, 2006

freese family farm, iowa: where the wild things purportedly are

go cougars!
(Coincidentally, 'Cougars' is the nickname of the consolidated high school in my hometown)

Rumor has it that there's a cougar on the loose around these parts. My mom was telling me how a neighboring farmer used to have twenty-some feral cats that lurked around his machinery shed. Now there are only three, and some of the dead cats "heads was crushed where he [the alleged coyote] killed them, the fur was still there, but he'd eaten the insides out, and [the farm owner] looked on the Internet and that's the way cougars do." Somebody else even says they had a photo of it. A cousin of mine, however, says "I ain't believing there's a cougar until I see it with my own eyes."

13 comments:

jnsys said...

There are wild things in Iowa. The very first summer camp we went to, there were rumors of a mountain lion in the next county, and we heard plenty of coyotes in the night. A cougar, huh? That's the power of the Internet...

tina said...

Let the wild rumpus begin!

Anonymous said...

I'll believe it when I see it on Flickr.

Anonymous said...

Doesn't cougar=puma=mountain lion? A year or two ago one was found sitting in a tree in Sioux City, and I remember other reported sightings when I grew up near there. They do occasionally appear in IA, although I have no idea what their preferences are for disembowelment.

Anonymous said...

Cougars have been seen in heavily wooded parts of Iowa. Living not far from JFW's homestead I can tell you this is NOT a heavily wooded area.

The coyotes, on the other hand, are thriving in the area. On summer nights the yipping and howling keep me awake.

~pj

Anonymous said...

Siebens, I'm going out on a limb here, but I imagine that cougars, like most conscious beings, aren't too fond of disembowelment.
:)
Maybe they do like eating guts, though. (sorry, I know, this is a family-safe blog. for the most part.)

Anonymous said...

Those gut devouring cougars are probably why we haven't had a "bigfoot" sighting lately.

Anonymous said...

i saw you on two different days during your short trip to madison. both times you had on the same pink shirt that you are wearing in this photo. did you just bring one shirt with you from cambridge? did cougars disembowel your luggage?

Anonymous said...

One of my colleagues told me just this morning about seeing a disemboweled dear over the weekend that his friend said was certainly devoured by a mountain lion because of how clean the carcass was and other disembowel-y indicators.
Coincidence? I think yes.

Anonymous said...

ack - make that "deer" not dear.
STUPID.

Anonymous said...

Isn't he pretty in pink?

jeremy said...

'Tis true I wore the same shirt three out of my six days of traveling. As I was leaving on day #3, someone did see me and say, "Dude, what's happened to you?" It was a tiring trip in many respects.

Anonymous said...

I wish Jeremy had pulled a Pretty in Pink. Then he would have taken two pretty normal looking pink dress shirts and sewn them together into one atrociously ugly pink dress shirt.