BEAVER VALLEY — A 155-pound male cougar believed to have killed a Holstein bull more than twice its size near a family’s home west of Port Ludlow early Wednesday morning was tracked by hounds and shot to death Thursday.
“I would say it ranks right up there among the biggest cats I’ve ever seen,” said Sgt. Phil Henry, a longtime Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife agent whose territory includes East Jefferson and East Clallam counties.
“I would say it’s one of the largest. Usually, ‘large’ is 140 pounds,” he said.
“It takes a big cat to bring down a cow.”
Henry and other agents with a houndsman and dogs tracked and treed the animal at about 8 a.m. Thursday about a mile in the woods from where Marilee and Jake Liske reported the dead bull at about 7 a.m. Wednesday.
The bull was found dead adjacent to the Liske home at 6514 Beaver Valley Road, which is also known as state Highway 19.
‘Pretty big’
“It’s pretty big,” said Marilee Liske at her home Thursday morning, shortly after the cougar was killed.
“It is definitely something I would not like to meet walking.”
She said she had never before seen a wild cougar, just one in captivity at the Olympic Game Farm in Sequim.
A neighbor about a 1 ½ mile away reported losing a cow in an apparent cougar attack about two months earlier, Marilee Liske said.
She reported the big tom cougar after her husband went to feed the family’s cattle at about 7 a.m. Wednesday and came upon the grisly discovery.
“It had been killed and had been dragged quite a ways and buried,” she said.
The family, including her 4-year-old son, were relieved to know the cougar was dead, she added.
Henry estimated that the cougar was 5 years old.
“We put the hounds out and they struck it pretty hard,” he said. “It was a long donnybrook.
“From where [the bull] was killed and where [the cougar] was actually shot out of a tree was about a half-mile in thick brush and forest.”
Henry said that in recent weeks he has only received one phone call reporting a cougar sighting near where many cougars have been seen over the years: near U.S. Highway 101 north of Quilcene at the Little Quilcene River crossing.
Henry said cougars will partially bury their kill and return to it, which gives trackers the opportunity use hounds to capture a scent.
Cougars killed
Three cougars have been shot in recent months.
Win Miller, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife officer based in Port Angeles, shot and killed two juvenile cougars in late December north of Quilcene, the first time since the fall that a livestock-killing mountain lion had been dispatched.
The smaller cougars each killed a sheep on Maple Lane north of Quilcene and a llama nearby during a period spanning Dec. 27-28.
Miller and a houndsman tracked the animals and the cats were treed at the same time and shot.
Shot and killed in August was an unusually aggressive cat that killed three alpacas and other livestock on private property at the end of Toandos Peninsula in Coyle.
Last fall another cat was shot after it was treed on Rice Lake Road, Henry reported.
Cougars are the largest members of the cat family in North America.
Adult males average about 140 pounds, but can weigh as much as 180 pounds and measure from 7-feet to 8-feet long from nose to tip of tail.
Adult males stand about 30 inches tall at the shoulder.
Adult female cougars are, on average about 25 percent smaller than males. Cougars vary in color from reddish-brown to tawny to gray, with black tips on their long tails.
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Port Townsend-Jefferson County Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.