Oh, deer! A good nature mystery

Jun. 12—It's not something you see every day. Actually, it's not something I've ever seen.

My wife was running at Seven Mile Creek Park when she spotted a dash of color in the green woods that jumped out at her. A decomposed deer carcass was stashed in a tree about 5 feet off the ground.

I went back and found it later, but not before walking past it once. It's just a ways into Trail 3 and about 50 feet off the trail.

At least a couple of others had noticed it last week, at least one calling Stein Innvaer, head of the Nicollet Department of Natural Resources office.

I could think of only three scenarios for a deer in a tree. My first was that a cougar stashed it there to feast on later.

The second was that a deer could try to jump over a limb and get its feet so tangled it couldn't get out and died. But there didn't appear to be any way it could have gotten hung up and no reason it would have decided to leap over the limb.

The third was that some kids hung it there as a prank to fuel speculation about cougars. But unless they just happened to find a dead deer nearby, they would have had to bring it into the park and then haul it a quarter mile back on the trails. And they didn't put it in a place it was likely to ever be spotted by anyone. They would have hung it near a parking lot or at least somewhere it would quickly be spotted.

I had a fourth theory — that it was stashed there by Bigfoot — but there are so many Bigfoot doubters, I hate to even mention it.

Fascination with cougar sightings — often of dubious nature — have been around for many years in this area.

The natural range of cougars, known as mountain lions in the West, is in the Black Hills and the western mountain ranges.

But they also wander hundreds of miles.

The DNR has spent plenty of time investigating cougar sightings, more often than not deciding the blurry photo of something in the distance is more likely a big house cat or some other animal than a cougar.

But there also have been enough confirmed sightings in the Minnesota River Valley over the years to show cougars at least pass through the area. The rugged ravines, water sources and plenty of cover, deer and other food sources makes the river area a good habitat for cougars.

"We get cougar reports all the time," Innvaer said. "They're very hard to nail down, but some are very good. There was one in Kilkenny a couple of years ago that was very clearly a cougar. It was on a trail cam. There was a deer in the foreground and the eyes of a cougar shining in the background and it was clearly a cougar."

He's a bit suspicious the carcass in the tree was a cougar stashing a meal and said with no tracks or poop visible in the area, there's no way to attribute it to a cougar.

Cougars generally don't pull their kills up into trees — that's most common among the African cats. Cougars tend to dig a shallow hole and cover their kill with branches and leaves to hide it until they return.

But they have been known to take to trees with their food.

A National Park Service official in Colorado responded to someone's question about how the body of a mule deer got high into a pine tree: "This must have been a mountain lion kill, or an animal that died of other causes, was found by a mountain lion, and subsequently eaten. Once the mountain lion had eaten its fill, it cached the remainder of the carcass in the tree to keep it away from coyotes."

We'll never know for sure how the deer ended up in the tree, but that's OK. It's nice to have mysteries.

Even though we have trail cams and drones and tracking devices and all manner of scientific knowledge, the great outdoors continue to hold plenty of unexplained things.

That's a comforting thought in a world where we can track down the answers to just about anything.

Tim Krohn can be contacted at tkrohn@mankatofreepress.com or 507-720-1300.