Arizona Cougar Hunting Guides and Outfitters

Arizona Cougar: The cougar found in Arizona is a large New World cat that compares in size and strength with the jaguar. This big game animal and predator is not only known by the name cougar Felis {puma} concolor, but is also known as mountain lion, puma, panther, painter, and catamount, originally was found in an area stretching from Alaska and Canada on the north, down through Arizona to the far south to Patagonia at the southernmost end of South America. Today the cougar can still be found in the open and mountainous areas of South America, in Central America and Mexico, and, in somewhat smaller numbers, in the more sparsely inhabited regions of the western parts of the Canada and the United States as far east as Florida and in some of the western states including Arizona, which cougar hunts and trips are planned during each year. The range of the cougar coincides in area rather closely with that of the deer which is its major source of food. Both of these big game animals are offered by a large range of different hunting guides and outfitters in Arizona. Each company should be contacted to see where in Arizona they are located and what surface features are in their area that will affect the hunt.

The cougar has a small head, a lithe, powerful body covered with a uniform tawny or grayish coat, and a long, heavy tail, slightly tufted at the tip. These colors help hide this big game when on a hunt or being hunted by outfitters or guides. Large tomcats {males} weigh up to 170 pounds, and twenty-five to thirty inches at the shoulder, and have a total length of from six to over eight feet, including the thirty-inch tail. The female cougar is usually somewhat smaller than the tom. The cougar is the second largest cat commonly found in North America, being surpassed only by the jaguar.

The cougar is a big-game hunter, and deer are its favorite prey. It sleeps in a cave or sun-bathes on a rock ledge during the day, leaving its lair at nightfall to stalk its prey, which it brings down with its lightning-speed sprint. The fact that cougars found in Arizona do sleep during the day makes it harder for a sportsman on a guided hunt to find it. But when found it could be very dangerous and a good Arizona hunting guide or outfitter should help prepare their clients on what to expect if they have never been on this type of hunt. A cougar can spring forward twenty-five feet in one leap, jump down from a height of sixty feet, and jump up fifteen feet; it is capable of hauling a victim five times its own size for a considerable distance. After satisfying its hunger, the cougar carefully covers the remainder of the carcass with leaves until ready to feed again. Sometimes you will come upon a buried carcass and it is a good place to start looking for this big game. And Arizona has many forestlands for the cougar to live with over 113,000 square miles of land.

Cougars have no fixed breeding season. But a good Arizona hunting guide or outfitter will keep a good watch on if the cat you are about to shoot is pregnant if it can be seen from a distance by the low larger belly. During the mating season the cougar often utters a loud, blood-curdling cry that can be heard two miles away. The kittens, numbering up to five in a litter, are born three months after mating. At birth they are a foot long, weigh about one pound, and are covered with yellowish, downy, spotted fur. The kittens’ eyes are tightly closed for the first eight or nine days after birth; their spots begin to fade when six months old, and completely disappear at one year. They are feed by the mother by the game that she has hunted during the night.

Arizona Hunting Season Schedule

Arizona Hunting License

United States Weather

The cougar has a life expectancy of about fifteen years. It has no natural enemies except perhaps the rarely encountered grizzly bear. The Indians in South America claim that a cougar is more than a match for a jaguar in a fight. This cat is elusive and, with very rare exceptions, never makes an unprovoked attack on man. Hunting-Trips-R-Us has listed these companies for our visitors benefit and hope that they will use this information on the Arizona cougar hunting guides and outfitters as it was intended.