Hay harvesters encounter cougar

Jake Bunch does not feel as secure harvesting and baling hay near Union as he did a month ago.

He never will.

And for good reason.

Suddenly he noticed that members of his crew were jumping into vehicles and quickly switching on their engines. A moment later Bunch saw what was wrong.

He looked up to see a cougar running out of the gravel parking lot.

“It was pretty nerve wracking,’’ said Bunch, a La Grande resident.

Crew members who first saw the cougar told Bunch it had been about 20 feet from the men laying along side a trailer hitch bar watching them. Nobody knows how long it had been there.

What is particularly alarming is that the cougar had not been bothered by the lights and human activity in the parking lot.

“The cougar didn’t run away until they turned the engines on,’’ Bunch said.

The next morning Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Leonard Erickson was called in and found fresh cougar tracks all around the parking lot and the adjacent field. The tracks indicated the cougar was relatively small, Erickson said.

The biologist spent two hours examining the site and found no indication that a cougar was staying in the area. No animals killed by cougars or cougar beds were discovered.

Erickson also observed that deer in the area did not appear alarmed, which they usually are when a cougar is nearby.

Bunch and his fellow crew members, who often hay from about 10 p.m. to 3 a.m., are now taking added precautions to protect themselves in the event a cougar returns. For example, before getting out of a vehicle in a field at night they will call for another crew member to drive up to them and watch as a precaution.