There's a mountain lion living in our backyard!

One day after finishing homeschool in the morning we went on a hike up in to the forest behind our house. It is boreal forest, which is a type of forest that is home to black bears, grizzly bears, moose, deer and lots of other interesting and scary North American animals.

Can you spot my brother and I at the top of the big logpile?

We walked for about 30 minutes up a trail. It was me, my Dad, my little sister Heidi and my little brother Finn. Soon we found a huge log pile that gave us a good view. We climbed to the top and got our binoculars out. Soon we saw 4 bighorn sheep on the steepest bit of the cliff. My dad wondered if they had been forced up there by a predator.

Using our binoculars to spot bighorn sheep, and then a mountain lion!

Suddenly we heard 5 loud yowling screams that sounded like an angry cat. I quickly got out my binoculars and saw a huge mountain lion walking down the hill. He was about 3m from head to tail. And he was about 150m from us!

We carefully climbed down the log pile. My Dad watched the mountain lion while we got down safely. He crouched low like he was going to stalk us. We walked carefully down the trail and back to our house.

We take wood spears in to the forest to make ourselves look bigger.

The next day we went back in to the forest and we saw mountain lion poo on the trail close to our house. The lion had been stalking and watching us walk home.

This is the mountain lion poo that we found on the trail that's close to where we walk out to our house. He was following us!

It was scary but also really exciting. My Dad and I carry bear spray and we all have big spears when we go in to the forest now which makes us look bigger to other predators.