The Ghost Cat and Me
Photographing pumas led me to discover wilderness in my backyard
The cat at the heart of this article has many names. You may know it as “mountain lion,” “cougar,” or “panther.” I will refer to it as “puma,” the name most often used by scientists like myself.
As a fresh undergraduate in a stuffy dorm room, I wanted nothing more than to experience wilderness. I was studying environmental science, but my classes consisted solely of PowerPoint slides and lectures. Stuck in Silicon Valley, I felt as far from nature as I could get.
So I left. I harassed my university’s study abroad office, and as soon as Covid regulations permitted, I escaped to Kenya to study elephants. I woke every morning to the towering sight of Kilimanjaro. I researched the world’s largest land animal, whose beauty brought me to tears. I witnessed the Great Migration, the crossing of 1.5 million wildebeest and 1 million zebra from Tanzania to Kenya. My fellow researchers and I hooped and hollered as we stood half out the top of a land cruiser, rain stinging our faces as we rode straight into a lightning storm through a landscape so saturated with wildebeest and zebra that their numbers faded into the horizon. This is what I’ve been looking for, I thought, this is where I’m meant to be.
