A Cambria couple captured surveillance video of a mountain lion walking through their front yard.
In the Lodge Hill neighborhood, there are quite a few deer crossing signs posted, so to catch wildlife in action, the couple set up motion sensor cameras. What they saw Wednesday morning caught them off guard.
“The deer came running through here and off this direction and everything was caught on the camera on the tree right here and then just a little bit later, the mountain lion came through right after them,” explained Sharon McCartney.
At 6:43 a.m. on Wednesday, the surveillance video shows two deer.
“They are moving pretty quick,” said Gary Sumrow.
Then about a minute later, a mountain lion strolls through.
“It was like wow!” McCartney said. “We’ve been waiting to see this! And there it is!”
McCartney and her boyfriend, Gary, have been hoping to capture a mountain lion on video for years now.
“I mean, what did you think when you saw it?” asked KSBY News reporter Alexa Bertola.
“I was happy,” Sumrow said. “Because I’d seen every other type of animal in our yard with the camera at night and I had never caught a mountain lion. I knew they were around but I had never caught one.”
“We had set up some cameras, just mainly to watch the wildlife, so it’s been set up for probably six months and we catch everything else but this is the first time we had the mountain lion come through,” McCartney said.
“This one, I would say, is likely either a female or a pretty young animal maybe around the two-year range,” said Fish and Wildlife Environmental Scientist Ken Spencer. “I would put her at about 100 pounds, 120 pounds.”
Spencer says they get two to three calls a month about mountain lions roaming in Cambria.
Back in September, a mountain lion was reportedly hit by a car and killed along Highway 1.
“We have had reports of a female mountain lion with two young and we suspect it might have been one of those,” Spencer said.
McCartney posted her video on Facebook to warn others.
“And just right after that we saw a lady walking down the street, probably on her usual morning walk, so that was kind of frightening in a way,” she said.
Fish and Wildlife says the mountain lions are most active during dawn and dusk and they hunt through the evening because they are nocturnal. They mostly eat deer.
If you’re out in the early morning or early evening, an important tip is to have your dog on a leash and be aware of your surroundings.
