SEQUIM — Diane Hammer was stunned Saturday night by the sight of a long-legged cat outside her home at Old Olympic Highway and McComb Road.
While she was unable to estimate the size of the estimated 2½-foot-tall cougar that walked around her home and the cars in her driveway, she wants to warn her neighbors that the native animals do drop by the area about a mile northwest of Sequim.
“It wasn’t afraid of anything,” she recalled of the encounter at about 9:30 p.m.
“It was: ‘I’m in charge here.’”
Just two years ago, she said she found the front half of a deer carcass in a field on her property. The other half was left in her neighbor’s field over the fence.
“The deer population is really up and that draws them in,” she said. “But my concern is there are kids in the neighborhood.”
A school bus stop, which will once again be used in September, is nearby on Old Olympic Highway.
She reported the sighting to Win Miller, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife enforcement officer, who agreed that cougars do travel the Dungeness River corridor — which Hammer’s neighborhood is inside — in search of food, especially deer.
The Hammer home is about a half-mile east of the river that flows north though Dungeness
“I’ve had several sightings over the years because it’s near the Dungeness River,” he said, adding that no domestic animals have been reported killed in Clallam County by cougar in many months.
Miller said typically because they receive so many calls about cougar sightings, Fish and Wildlife officers do not respond unless a domestic animal is killed.
“Deer is their main diet,” Miller said, “but they are opportunistic, and sometimes the domestic cats and smaller dogs and chickens are killed.”
A fresh cougar kill is usually partially buried to hide it. Otherwise, coyotes are suspected.
“They don’t stay in one spot for very long unless they have a kill,” Miller said, adding that male cougars roam in a range of about 75 miles while females roam less than half that far for food.
“This year has been quiet than years in the past,” Miller said of sightings and no kills
during 2011.
He said he did not know why that was the case.
Cougars are seen all the way to Dungeness along the river corridor, and of course farther west in Clallam County and often in Quilcene crossing a stretch of U.S. Highway 101 in the north part of town.
“There was two sighting out at Salt Creek [campground] over the past week, in upper area by the bunkers,” he said. “They come off of Striped Peak.”
Tall fences help protect domestic animals, and large dogs outside will also fend off cougars, who want to avoid confrontation.
“But there is no surefire way to protect them” outdoors, he said of pets.
________
Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
