Birds, snakes, and numerous mammals prey on the jackrabbit, which is really a hare, and on the park’s desert cottontail and eastern cottontail rabbits. The coyote can sustain bursts of speed sufficient to run them down. An arch opportunist, the coyote eats almost anything, including an occasional tennis shoe. The bobcat and mountain lion (photo page 103) are the park’s two felines. The bobcat hunts by stealth. It will sit by a game trail for hours and then pounce on passing prey. Threats to the jackrabbit come from above, too, where the golden eagle soars. [Illustration: Coyote] [Illustration: Bobcat] [Illustration: Golden eagle] [Illustration: Jackrabbit] Toward twilight the whitetail deer put in another appearance. These dainty little animals are highly territorial, so you are likely to see the same band of bucks in the upper Basin, and the same doe and twin fawns near the campground turnoff. The eastern cottontails, larger than the desert cottontails, also come out at dusk, after spending the day in the very same thickets that the deer come to browse. A little later, skunks may appear. These spotted, striped, or hognosed nighttime foragers are cyclic in their populations, and like the raccoon they have a decided fondness for campgrounds. In the Basin as elsewhere, many residents are heard rather than seen, especially the tree crickets and katydids that sing their songs at night. The Chisos Mountains even boast their own katydid, known nowhere else in the world, the Big Bend quonker. Scraping its wings together it produces a squeak much like that of a cork being pulled from a wine bottle. The woods that rim the Basin to the south have a softer, more life-supporting look than the slopes above Panther Pass. They feature the same junipers and pinyon pines and the same pricklypear and century plant, but the difference is the grass. Tall and short, gold and blue, tasseled, tufted and feathered, it grows so thickly under the trees and between the shrubs that it all but covers the ground. You find basketgrass, too, with leaf edges like fine sawteeth and their tips frayed into curls of twine. With such abundant cover animals should thrive, and judging from the scat they do. In the fall the pricklypear is still in fruit, and it appears that everyone is eating brick-red tunas. At lower elevations where the tunas have already gone by, many animals are eating black persimmons.