| Science Writer David Baron to Speak on Cougar Attacks On January 14, 1991 eighteen-year-old Scott Lancaster went for his daily run behind Clear Creek High School in the Rocky Mountain foothills west of Denver. He didnot return. Two days later, searchers found Scott's body, eviscerated, tucked beneath bushes, and guarded by a massive cat- a mountain lion. The death of Scott Lancaster stunned not only the local community but also the scientific community, because until that time biologists considered mountain lions(a.k.a cougars, pumas,panthers) to be timid, nocturnal, elusive animals that avoided humans and human habitation. Yet an autpsy on the human body and a postmortem examination of the lion, which was shot and shot, confirmed the unthinkable; Scott Lancaster, an athletic young man, had been stalked, killed, and consumed by a healthy mountain lion on an ordinary Monday afternoon, in view of homes and an interstate highway. in the nonfiction book, The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature, (W.W. Norton and Company) award winning science journalist David Baron has revisited the scene and , like a detective investigating a cold cas, reinterviewed witnesses and reexamined the evidence to make sense of the unprecedented attack. "The answer was not to to be found in the cat's bullet-pierced body, or in the remains if its human victim," he writes,"but in the landscape." When sprawling suburbia pressed up against a greenbelt nature preserve, people coexist peacefully with the deer who wander onto their lawns. But mountain lions eat deer, and they soon follow their prey to town. By 1990, the lions became so bold that they persued rowdy frat parties, stalked a boy in his family's yard, chased a terrified jogger up a tree and, six months later killed Scott Lancaster.In January of 2004, a cougar attacked a female cyclist in a park just southof Los Angeles. The cougar pounced on her back, grabbed her head in its teeth and dragged her off into the bushes. Her female companion rran after, literally wrestling with the cougarto save her friend. While both women survived, the attack lead to the discovery of an earlier killing of a man. Beast in the Garden is ultimately about the artificiality of the modern American landscape and how this human-altered environment is changing animal behavior. "Like storms that develop where weather systems meet, Boulder's cougar problems, and Scott Lancaster's death, had resulted from the collision of two worlds- rebounding nature and civilation's sprawl-each moving in toward the othr, neither showing signs of slowing its advance," writes Baron. "Baron's ability as a storyteller" wrote A Colorado Daily reviewer,"contributes much to the sucess of Beast in the Garden. He carefully mixes the contemporary storyline with whimsical and shocking historical material, linking it all back to eerie, third-person account of an anonymous every-cougar that stalks the foothills of Boulder." David Baron has reported on science and environmental issues for National Public Radio for over fifteen years and has written for the Boston Globe and Outside. He is a three-time recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science journalism award. For more information, go to: Baron@beastinthegarden.com --Adapted with permission from W.W. Norton press release
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| Friday, March 26, 2004 • 12:30 p.m.-1:50 p.m. • Visual Arts Gallery • Dearlove Hall |
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