"Male Pumas make what are known as 'scrapes' to look for mates but also to mark their territory"........ "The scrapes are usually located along Puma travel routes, such as ridgelines, canyon rims, drainage bottoms, under large trees and ledges, and at kill caches"...........Carnivore Tracker Sue Morse of KEEPING TRACK explains this behaviour in detail as follows: "With his hind feed, a Puma will scrape the ground backwards creating a small mound of dirt and leaves with a shallow hole about 8 inches long in front of it"............."The mound is then urinated upon and sometimes also marked with scat"..............."Although other species of cats "spray" urine and other fluids to scent mark, Pumas do not appear to conduct this behavior"..............."Scratch piles can be found throughout a Puma's homerange but may be found more often along the borders or where his territory overlaps with another cat's".............."By advertising, an adult male may demonstrate his dominance and thereby reduce the degree of trespass by other males (both resident and new immigrants), increase his own chances of breeding with resident females, and decrease the chances his mates and offspring will be harmed"............"Long-term residents have the opportunity to cover an area with scent marks, giving potential intruders ample opportunity to retreat before there is a life-threatening encounter".............."In addition to scat and urination for scent communication, Pumas sometimes also leave scratch markings on tree trunks or stumps through a process called claw raking"..........."Similar to a house cat scratching furniture, a Puma will stand on its hind legs and drag its claws down a tree trunk"..........."The scratches will be approximately four to eight feet off the ground, depending on the size of the cat, and run parallel and vertically down the tree a few feet"............."Although these scrapes may simply be part of the claw-grooming process, many researchers believe it is another way for the cats to announce their presence"............"Scent from the paws is left behind in the tree bark and cougars have been observed sniffing the scratches made by other cats"................"Likely, it marks one's territory to deter intruders and serves as a dating bulletin board for those ready to mate"

click on this link to view a video, showing how a male Puma makes a scrape. A few evenings later several coyotes come to investigate. They leave their own calling card. Then a female Puma arrives to smells the scrape.

https://thehumanfootprint.wordpress.com/tag/panthera-teton-cougar-project/

Pumas leave their mark

Posted on February 10, 2018 by Leslie

Biologist Max Allen and his colleagues worked on analyzing puma scrapes in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains and Mendocino County. Allen put up trail cameras on puma scrapes, hoping to find answers to research questions.

 How are cougars using scrapes to communicate? Why do they go to such elaborate means, rather than simply urinating as canines do? After analyzing more than one thousand videos of scraping behavior, he concluded that lions could distinguish not only the freshness of scrapes, but also the individual lions who made them. This knowledge is only an icebreaker; biologists are still in the dark as to what information cougars learn from scrapes.

Puma Scraping behaviour sequencing below

Interestingly, Allen, who was working in northern California where the top predators are cougars and black bears, discovered foxes were routinely cheek rubbing on puma scrapes, and doing this more frequently on the fresher ones. Cheek rubbing releases chemicals from the sebaceous gland, allowing animals to deposit their own scent, but it can also be a way of accumulating scent from the object rubbed. Since the fox cheek-rubbing visits didn’t correlate with fox breeding season, or with how recently other foxes had visited, Allen believes foxes were applying puma scent for protection from larger predators like bobcats and coyotes. In other words, foxes, being the crafty animals they are, were attempting to disguise themselves as pumas.

Male Puma Scrape 
depression (above picture) and female
Puma investigating a scrape left by a male

Here in the Yellowstone Ecosystem where cougars are subordinate to wolves, black bears and grizzly bears, red foxes don’t use this camouflage technique since smelling like a cougar might be an attractant, not a deterrent.

But cougar researcher Mark Elbroch discovered a different unique behavior of Yellowstone’s crafty red foxes. Elbroch wonders if foxes might be following pumas around in wintertime, since foxes seem to locate a cougar kill so quickly. On the Panthera Teton Cougar Project in Jackson Wyoming, with the advantage of G.P.S. collars, Elbroch might, for instance, see a cougar make a kill at 4:00 a.m., and he would be at the site by 8:00 a.m. When the crew arrived, there’d be a fox on it already. Foxes take great risks, he told me, and, incredibly, they are rarely killed.

Research on cougars in Yellowstone National Park used trail cameras on scrapes. Dan Stahler, project manager for the current Yellowstone cougar study, has video of scores of other animals investigating these scent marks, including a grizzly bear that laid down on the scrape and napped for the day.

If you’ve enjoyed learning a little bit about cougars (sometimes called pumas, mountain lions, panthers, and many other names), then look forward to my new book that will be published in 2018 called Ghostwalker: Tracking a Mountain Lion’s Soul through Science and Story.