Mountain lion
The cameras catch it through the year. Once in five years, in daylight.
In brief
Puma concolor, Felidae, order Carnivora.
- Visitor, recorded on a trail camera
- Native from Canada to Patagonia
- Obligate carnivore
Where it lives
The widest range of any large wild land mammal in the Americas, from the Yukon to the southern Andes.
When you see it
On the trail cameras through the year, almost always after dark. April 17, 2026 is the one daylight record.
What it eats
Mule deer, principally, at roughly one deer every week to ten days. It caches a kill and returns to it over several nights.
Here
The land holds deer, which makes it lion country by definition, and the cameras bear that out: video after video, nearly all of it at night.
If you do meet one: make noise, look big, pick up small children, and back away without turning your back.
By Yggdrasil Springs
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Mule deer
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Whiteleaf manzanita
The first thing in flower here, and often the only thing. Pink urns in January, on a shrub that peels itself red.
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Chaparral currant
It flowers when nothing else does. That is the whole point of it, and it is why the hummingbirds stay.
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The Butte Fire made this plant's decade. It came up through the burn and it is now one of the commonest shrubs on the land.
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Deer brush
Cream plumes over the whole hillside in April, and seed that can wait decades in the ground for the next fire.
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Yerba santa
Sticky, resinous, and named holy herb by people who used it for a cough long before anyone wrote it down.
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Mountain misery
Ankle-deep fern-like mats under the oaks, white rose flowers, and a resin that sticks to everything that walks through it.
2026-08-28
Twining snakelily
The only snakelily that climbs. It uses the shrub next to it to get its flowers up into the light.
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Shooting star
Swept-back magenta petals on a bare stalk. The shape is not decoration: it is a set of instructions for a bumblebee.
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Woolly Indian paintbrush
The red is not petals, and the plant is not feeding itself. Both facts take some getting used to.
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Yellow evening primrose
Opens at dusk, worked by moths in the dark, and orange and collapsed by the next afternoon.
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California everlasting
Papery whether it is flowering or setting seed, which makes it the hardest plant here to date honestly.
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Toyon
White flowers in June that nobody looks at, and red berries in December that everybody does.
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Canyon live oak
One tree that looks like two, and an acorn cup that settles the argument in about ten seconds.
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The blue acorns
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Silver bush lupine
The tall lupine: a woody, silver-leaved shrub to about 150 cm, holding violet spikes above the burn.
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Sky lupine
The short lupine: an annual, ankle high, that turns a whole hillside blue for about three weeks in April.
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Buckbrush
The other ceanothus. Stiff, grey, wedge-leaved and evergreen, and it flowers a month before deer brush.
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Black oak
The tree the Sentinels are. It is also the one that comes back from the root after a fire that killed everything above ground.
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Poison oak
It is not an oak, it is not always a shrub, and it does not always have green leaves. The one thing that never changes is the three.
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Yellow starthistle
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California buckeye
It drops its leaves in August, not November. The falls are named for it.
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Ponderosa pine
Needles in threes, and bark that smells of vanilla in the afternoon sun.
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Incense cedar
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Western bracken fern
One of the most widely distributed plants on earth, and it stands green in dry grass in August.
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Common mullein
Not from here. A rosette of felt one year, a two-meter spike the next, and then it is dead.
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Bull thistle
Not from here, and the spiny wings running down the stem are what name it.
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Himalayan blackberry
Not from here, and not going anywhere. The fruit is the reason the fox and the bear come through.
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Northern California black walnut
Native to California, and almost certainly standing here because somebody planted it.
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Sierra iris
Pale yellow, low in the dry grass, and it grows nowhere outside California.
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White morning glory
A native vine with a flower twice the size of the introduced bindweed it gets mistaken for.
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