Spirit Guide of the day is Cougar! Coming forward to help lead your family or community may be important now. Stop dragging your feet and get on those tasks that you need to complete, moving forward with decisive choices. Stay strong and assertive with those who are demanding for you to change. When Cougar comes into your life, this means a time of transformation into your own power is coming. Test your own power, for now is when you have almost passed all of your trials and can begin to access your own abilities. Cougar teaches one how to use decisive responsibility for your own actions and how to take charge of your life. Cougar reminds us that we can access the abilities of confidence, nobility, leadership, and self-assurance. Silence and swiftness are often associated with feline spirit guides and these attributes are power with Cougar. These traits make them a powerfully protective guide who chooses the perfectly timed moment to take action. Remember patience in your actions and take the time to gather information and consider your actions before moving. Observe and analyze while refraining from adopting a power-hungry attitude when you do take action and make your decisions. In Native American tales, Cougar plays a variety of roles. In some Western tribes, hearing the scream of a Cougar is a bad omen yet some Eastern tribes associate Cougars with being noble hunters. The Pueblo tribes consider Cougar to be one of the six true directional guardians and is associated with the north and the color yellow. Zuni hunters carried stone cougar pieces for protection including healing and hunting powers. In South America, this feline is associated with the earth and wealth by the Incan people. People who connect with Cougar are well-balanced, courageous types who are often called to take places of leadership in order to help provide others with answers. Sometimes this may be met with others criticism, but once a cougar soul has decided what to do they will take action to complete it. They will often prefer solitude over socializing.


Cougars, Puma Concolor, are the second largest cats in North America and go by many names including: Mountain lion, puma, or panther. These tawny colored felines have long, slender bodies with round heads and pointed ears. They can grow up to 9 ft from head to tail and males can weigh up to 150 lbs. Females, meanwhile, grow to around 100 lbs. The Cougar lives from British Columbia and south Alberta through western North America, including a small region in Florida, to most of South America. These adaptable felines can live in many different habitats including mountains, coniferous forests, swamps, grasslands, lowland tropical forests, and deserts. The subspecies, Florida Cougar, is an endangered creature living from Eastern Texas to Florida. The hind legs of Cougars are longer than the front, enabling them to possess an extraordinary jumping ability of up to 18 ft high in one leap. Although thought to have a poor sense of smell, these cats have acute senses of sight and hearing. These carnivores feed primarily on large mammals such as deer, but are also known to eat beaver, marmots, raccoons, birds, coyotes, and even insects such as grasshoppers. Cougars prefer an ambush technique where they will stalk within 30 feet of a chosen prey target and leap with their powerful legs onto their victim's back where they can bite into the neck. These solitary creatures will avoid other individuals except for during mating. Communication uses visual and olfactory signals while males will make regular scrapings in the soil or snow to mark territory. Cougar's cannot roar like other big cats, instead possessing the ability to purr, growl, hiss, and make bird-like whistles. The female cougar can emit a loud, hair-raising scream. Although the majority of Cougar births in North American occur between late winter and early spring, Cougars do not have a fixed mating season. Females will often reproduce every other year to litters pf between 1 and 6 kittens. These kittens are birthed in dens locate in crevices, rock shelters, caves, thickets or other protected places. These dens are lined with vegetation and moss for the tiny, spotted kittens. Born with the darker spotted markings, cougar kittens will loose these markings around 6 months of age. Although they can nurse for up to 3 months after this, they will begin to eat meat at 6 weeks. A cougar kitten will stay with their mother until around 1 or 2 years old and often will remain with their sibling for another 2-3 months after leaving their mother. It is then when the young will begin to find and maintain their own permanent home territory, only reproducing afterwards.