A skinny mountain lion or one fat bobcat

Well was it or wasn’t it? A woman who lives on Sandcastle Drive in Corona del Mar says it was. Newport Beach animal control says it wasn’t. The woman says it was a mountain lion. Animal control says it was a bobcat.

I have no opinion on the matter, but I can tell you that either one would get my attention.

The woman who reported the oversized cat saw it from her balcony and says she is absolutely positively clear on the difference between a bobcat and a mountain lion.

“It was just kind of cruising in the grass,” she told the Daily Pilot. She said it was bigger than a golden retriever and definitely “was not a bobcat.”

A Newport Beach police officer responding to the call also saw the little beast, OK, big beast, near 5th Avenue and Poppy Avenue. A police helicopter called in to search the area not only found the big, or little, beast but managed to get it on videotape. After reviewing the tape carefully, Newport Beach animal control pronounced the mega-feline a bobcat, estimated at 65 pounds.

Unfortunately, that estimate only serves to cloud the “was-it-or-wasn’t-it?” debate even further. If you were a trained biologist, like me, you would know that the proper name for bobcat is Felis rufus, which explains why they would rather be called Bob.

Searching Felis rufus on the Internet turned up 98,300 references on Yahoo and 124,000 on Google. In an exhaustive review of those sites ? well, 10 of them ? the average weight of an adult bobcat was 15 pounds at the smallest and 35 pounds at the largest. Ergo, which means therefore, if there was a 65-pound bobcat in Corona del Mar, it was the porkiest bobcat in history. Mountain lions on the other hand run from 130 to 150 pounds for boy lions and 65 to 90 pounds for girl lions. So if that was a mountain lion cruising Corona del Mar, it was the Calista Flockhart of mountain lions.

Corona del Mar resident Jack McSunas, who walks his dog near where the big cat was spotted, took it all in stride. A 17-year resident of Poppy Avenue, McSunas said he has seen a number of coyotes and mountain lions in the area over the years. Yikes.

Whatever it was, the big cat in Corona del Mar is one more chapter in the continuing saga of what happens along the thin green line that separates the part that nature owns from the part that we own.

The history of wild animal sightings in these parts is long and rich. Ask anyone who lives on or near the Back Bay. There are a whole lot of critters in there that show their face, or their tail, or both now and then, especially coyotes.

In 1990, when construction crews were transforming Newport Boulevard into the extension of the 55 Freeway, a family of red foxes was found living in a ditch there. Work stopped, and what began as a “cute critter” item in the local press soon became a national story, mostly driven by a photograph of a cowering red fox in what was left of his burrow. Within days, people from Bangor to Boise were talking about the little red foxes in some place called Costa Mesa. Fortunately, then-state-Sen. Marian Bergeson got involved, which is always the best option, and made everyone settle down.

The California Department of Fish and Game was called in and the foxes were taken to a more appropriate setting, tagged and released.

In my neighborhood, we have learned to peacefully coexist with the skunk, the possum and the raccoon. If you are motoring on Mesa Verde Drive or Placentia Avenue in the late night hours, the sight of a skunk or possum chugging across the road is as common as the sight of a skunk or possum chugging across the road.

We have seen more raccoons than you can count, which is a lot of raccoons, over the years, including a family of three that moved into our backyard awhile back.

One dark night, I made my way to the side yard with a firm and fully packed Hefty trash bag in hand. When I was a few feet from the trash can, I saw two beady, bright red eyes trained on me. That got my attention, fast, but the hissing sound off my right shoulder stopped me cold.

As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could just make out an impressively large raccoon on top of the trash can, and as I turned to the right, a smaller one perched on the fence about three feet away, baring his teeth and hissing. When it comes to wild animals, I am not the least bit territorial and you don’t have to hiss at me twice.

I slowly lowered the trash bag to the ground and backed away, gesturing to the bag as if to say, “It’s yours, boys. I was never here, and I never saw you.”

It took 20 minutes to clean up the mess the next morning, but it was worth every minute.

So there you have it.

Lions and foxes, no tigers or bears. If you see something that looks scary, stay away from it, especially if it hisses. Better yet, call animal control.

I gotta go.