Two mountain lions trailed a camper, mistaking him for a hopeless cub. A game trail camera in Yosemite National Park revealed startling images: two mountain lions quietly trailing a man along a backcountry path. The photos showed the big cats moving about 30 minutes behind him, step for step.
Rangers quickly checked the park’s logs and identified the man as a registered camper. Fearing for his safety, they rushed to his campsite. But when they arrived, the scene was far from an attack. The two lions were not stalking from the shadows instead, they were calmly lying on a rock face above him, watching silently.
When the lions’ tag numbers were checked, scientists discovered a heartbreaking detail: these were the same lions who had lost their cub earlier that month. Experts now believe they may have followed the man because they saw him as a young, vulnerable lion needing protection.
“Had they been hunting,” one ranger explained, “they would have been hiding, crouched and unseen not basking openly on a rock above him.” The eerie encounter is now being studied as another example of how complex, and at times compassionate, mountain lion behavior can be.
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