Puma

If you’ve looked into my Costa Rica gallery, you may have seen this shot before but I never posted it to the blog. This was the only time I’ve ever seen a mountain lion/puma/cougar (they’re all the same thing) in the wild. And she was only five feet away. She wasn’t five feet away when I took this photo — more like 40 feet — but she was five feet away when I first came across her the night before. It was the first time I visited Corcovado National Park down in southern Costa Rica. I arrived late in the day and had to hike for about an hour or so to reach a permanent tented camp on the beach. I had about an hour of good light left after setting up camp so decided to go for a hike in the rain forest that led down to the beach. The forest was very thick and I had my longest lens mounted to my camera so I decided to stop, take off my backpack and change to a shorter lens. As soon as I had my lens off my camera is when I felt a presence to my left and turned to see the puma. She had a dead white faced capuchin monkey in her mouth and was backing into the brush. I couldn’t believe my bad luck — the shot of a lifetime and I had a camera with no lens on it. The next morning I got up at about 4 AM and hiked through forest. Sure enough, I found the puma, but without the monkey. This is the one shot that I got before the puma turned and walked away.
Nikon D200 with Nikkor 70-200mm lens (at 200mm) ISO 400, f/5.6 at 1/60th of a second, Nikon SB-800 flash