Tag: Paula Wild

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The Cougar wins gold!

I’d for­got­ten about the Foreword Review’s IndieFab Nature Book of the Year nom­in­a­tion so was caught totally off guard when The Cougar re­ceived the gold award!

As al­ways, I’m so grate­ful for the sup­port and great work  done by my pub­lish­er, Douglas & McIntyre and to all the people who so gen­er­ously con­trib­uted their know­ledge, ex­per­i­ences and pho­to­graphs. The book would­n’t ex­ist without them.

Renee Andor wrote a great art­icle about The Cougar’s win in the Comox Valley Record.

 

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Cougars in urban areas

It’s un­be­liev­able how stealthy and quiet cou­gars are. And how of­ten they can be near hu­mans – on trails or even in urb­an areas – without any­one noticing.

Visit here to view im­ages and a video clip of a cou­gar cas­u­ally strolling the streets of a res­id­en­tial area in south­ern California.

As well as be­ing si­lent, cou­gars can re­main still for hours. Scroll down to the third and fourth pho­tos at this site to see the spot where the cou­gar known as 46m hid on a busy street in the San Francisco Bay area for six hours. Despite hun­dreds of people walk­ing, bik­ing and driv­ing by, no one knew a cou­gar was in the bushes un­til 46m de­cided to make a run for it.

And it doesn’t only hap­pen in California. In 1992, a four-year old, 60 kilo­gram cou­gar was tran­quil­ized and re­moved from the un­der­ground park­ing gar­age of the Empress Hotel in down­town Victoria, BC.

hidden cougarThis photo by Jessie Dickson shows just how well a cou­gar can blend in.

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The Cougar shortlisted for two awards!

I’m so ex­cited! And none of it would have happened without all the hard work, en­ergy and or­gan­iz­a­tion of the staff at Douglas & McIntyre. The D&M/Harbour pub­lish­ing team are ab­so­lutely the best!

Here’s the press re­lease my pub­li­cist, Heather Lohnes, sent out March 13: 

Paula Wild’s The Cougar Receives Two Award Nominations in Two Days

     Author Paula Wild’s BC best­selling book The Cougar: Beautiful, Wild and Dangerous (Douglas & McIntyre; $34.95) has been nom­in­ated for two awards in as many days. Just yes­ter­day, the BC Book Prizes an­nounced that The Cougar is a fi­nal­ist for their 2014 Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award. And today, Foreword Reviews has an­nounced it as a fi­nal­ist for their 2013 Book of the Year Awards, in the cat­egory of Nonfiction – Nature.

The Cougar blends nat­ur­al his­tory, sci­entif­ic re­search, First Nations stor­ies and first-per­son ac­counts to ex­plore our evolving re­la­tion­ship with the power­ful and in­triguing pred­at­or called cou­gar, puma, moun­tain lion, and ap­prox­im­ately forty oth­er names. It also in­cludes amaz­ing pho­to­graphs and up-to-date in­form­a­tion on cou­gar aware­ness and de­fense tac­tics for those liv­ing, work­ing or trav­el­ling in cou­gar coun­try. Throughout, au­thor Paula Wild delves into what makes this an­im­al that both fas­cin­ates and fright­ens us so beau­ti­ful, so dan­ger­ous, and why cou­gars re­main an im­port­ant and valu­able part of our environment.

Paula Wild is the au­thor of sev­er­al oth­er books, in­clud­ing One River, Two Cultures, The Comox Valley and Sointula: Island Utopia, win­ner of a B.C. Historical Federation Certificate of Merit. She has also writ­ten for nu­mer­ous peri­od­ic­als, in­clud­ing Beautiful British Columbia, Reader’s Digest and Canada’s History Magazine. She lives in Courtenay, BC.

The BC Book Prizes’ Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award, sup­por­ted by the BC Booksellers’ Association, is presen­ted to the pub­lish­er and the au­thor of the book that is most suc­cess­ful in terms of pub­lic ap­peal, ini­ti­at­ive, design, pro­duc­tion and con­tent. The win­ner will be an­nounced at the 30th Annual Lieutenant Governor’s BC Book Prizes Gala in Vancouver on May 3, 2014. For more in­form­a­tion on this award, vis­it www​.bcbook​prizes​.ca.

The Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Awards cel­eb­rate new in­die books from au­thors and pub­lish­ers whose work stands out from the crowd, with awards in over sixty cat­egor­ies. The win­ners of the 16th Annual Book of the Year Awards will be cel­eb­rated at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Las Vegas on June 27, 2014. For more in­form­a­tion on this award, vis­it www​.botya​.fore​wordre​views​.com.

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Cougar chasing monkey in tree for food…or fun?

Cougars are hard-wired to kill, that’s how they sur­vive. But do they al­ways chase prey be­cause they’re hungry? No one knows for sure.

There are in­stances where cou­gars chose to tackle large prey such as a buck elk even when smal­ler an­im­als are read­ily ac­cess­ible. Biologist and cou­gar safety ex­pert, Dave Eyer, spec­u­lates this might be be­cause some cou­gars like a big chal­lenge even when no one’s around to applaud.

I’ll take that one step fur­ther and sug­gest that some­times cou­gars chase prey for prac­tise or for the sheer pleas­ure of the pur­suit. Of course, if they catch what they’re after, they’ll kill and eat it.

Take a look at these pho­tos of a cou­gar chas­ing a howl­er money through the trees in Costa Rica and see what you think.