SFist article:SF Animal Control Locates Mountain Lion In Pac Heights, Will Transport It Elsewhere
The lion had been seen wandering around the last couple of days. They caught up with it near the intersection of Octavia and Butler which is pretty far from where it must have come from (Santa Cruz Mountains or Marin? Or maybe it was an escaped pet?). Hopefully it will be relocated to a spot far away from humans.
Plenty of cougars in SF, but mountain lions? Pretty crazy. It might survive in the Presidio quite easily, but how would it have gotten there?
Article says Octavia & Pacific. Butler looks to be a one-block street in South San Francisco, nowhere near Octavia.
Octavia Butler was a SciFi author (but not an SF SciFi author AFAIK)
Sausalito Ferry and then Muni?
Is there a difference? For me the terms refer to the same species of animal.
Pssst… “Cougar” is a slang term too.
I’m aware of that, but not that cougars (in the non-animal sense) have any particular association with San Francisco.
Oops, got my street names mixed up.
I will speculate the Santa Cruz Mountains - as I really doubt a wild animal like a mountain lion would cross the Golden Gate Bridge, or take the Sausalito Ferry, or Bus 101 from Marin County.
At least the cops did not blow it away this time.
Well, I’m glad they were able to catch it and didn’t have to destroy it. When I watched the news this morning they were still trying to find it.
It would have had to cross a fair few residential neighborhoods to get all the way to Pacific Heights, difficult to do without being seen.
A cougar, mountain lion, puma, panther, catamount, and a few other names all refer to the same animal.
I was thinking maybe Caltrain up the peninsula.
Mountain lions are, in fact, pumas, not panthers. Before you scold me for pointless argumentation, I am sure someone, somewhere, has called them that, but if you told me you saw a “panther” I might imagine a jaguar or leopard or something.
Might it have actually taken public transportation? Or at least, a public transportation right-of-way? Around here, the land immediately to the sides of the transit rails is often pretty wild, and secluded in a valley below the surrounding land, which makes them often used as corridors by wildlife.
I dunno, this one seems like he’d fit in just fine:
And if not, he just has to exit, stage left.
There is an actual subspecies of puma called the “Florida panther”, so there are a lot of people calling them that.
I will refer you to other sources.
Not in North American English:
a large American wild cat with a plain [tawny] to [grayish] coat, found from Canada to Patagonia.
OK, appreciate the link— I was under the impression that in California they typically call them “mountain lions”, though.
So, it seems that there are not too many jaguars wandering around the San Francisco Bay Area these days. Who knew?