The wildcats “were the immigrants who filled missing ranks and brought new blood to established colonies. Stolzenburg, author of “Rat Island,” “Where the Wild Things Were” and numerous magazine articles on saving wildlife, is understandably passionate about a subject the lay reader likely hears more about in the African context than in a U.S. Instead, he has taken on the far more complex task of examining the human-wildlife conflict in 21st-century America through the story of a single animal. In “Heart of a Lion,” William Stolzenburg could have presented a straightforward narrative about the legendary animal sometimes called the cat of many names - cougar, puma, catamount and mountain lion being just a few - and its surprising survival against tremendous odds.
Subsequent research revealed that the young male had come from the Black Hills in western South Dakota and that his 2,000-mile journey was the longest ever recorded of a member of Puma concolor, a subfamily of the so-called “small” wildcats that at one time were found throughout North and South America. Eighteen months later, the same tawny cougar would be struck and killed by an SUV on a Connecticut parkway just north of New York City.
It showed a mountain lion padding through a wooded area of Champlin on the night of Dec. 9, 2009, online edition of the Star Tribune featured a grainy video shot by a dashboard camera in Sgt. Southern Californians panic on learning that a cougar track has been discovered on the fringes of their gated neighborhood - mindless that cougars roamed these hills and canyons long before gated communities drew their lines in the chaparral.The Dec. Eventually, nobody remembers that wolves not long ago freely roamed the Adirondacks, and hence there is mad howling over the suggestion of returning them to their homeland. The wild standard sinks ever lower and becomes ever heavier to raise. On land, the big cats and wolves become feral house cats and coyotes. Gradually, imperceptibly, big sharks give way to small sharks, small sharks to baitfish, baitfish to jellyfish to slime.
Generation to generation, the natural world decays, the ratchet of perception tightens. The world as first seen by the child becomes his lifelong standard of excellence, mindless of the fact he is admiring the ruins of his parents. “It is the phenomenon made known by the marine biologist Daniel Pauly as the shifting-baseline syndrome.
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