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S44E2: WILLOW: Diary of a Mountain Lion | Clip

Caught on Camera: Mother Hunts Elk to Feed Six Kittens

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A mother mountain lion risks her life to feed her six kittens. This rare footage captures her incredible fight against the odds with a large elk in the snowy wilderness of Montana.

TRANSCRIPT

- [Narrator] It's February, it's six degrees.

It's the middle of the night.

There's three feet of snow on the ground.

And an elk walks into frame, with a mountain lion hanging off of its neck, with Willow hanging off of its neck.

We have a female mountain lion, say she's 100 pounds, taking down a spike bull elk.

We'll say he's 400 pounds.

And she's wrestling him down by strangling him slowly, while this elk is trying to stomp her and kick her and throw her.

If she gets injured, she can potentially not hunt for a while.

If she can't recover, she's done for, and her kittens are done for.

This is incredibly risky, and they do it all the time.

And we happen to catch it on video.

And Willow manages to drop this elk directly in front of her den.

As the daylight footage starts to appear, all these little kitten heads are popping up, and they've got rounded out bellies and bloody faces.

And we realize that Willow has six kittens.

And this is unheard of!

The family group feeds on that elk for a week, maybe a little bit more.

What we begin to see is they're moving between different den sites in the area.

We have these three dens that are really close to each other.

They're less than half a mile apart.

And we see Willow at one point leave the kill site.

She goes off on her own to scout one of these other dens.

And then returns a couple days after with all of her kittens in tow.

The average litter size for a mountain lion is one to four, with an average survival rate of one to two individuals.

The fact that we have a mother raising six, whether there is some form of adoption that takes place, or she just has six kittens, is unbelievable.