Mountain lion spotted in La Quinta backyard; What you need to know to stay safe

La Quinta residents are concerned about mountain lions in their backyards after one was spotted late last week.

The sighting happened in the early hours of Friday morning in the La Quinta Fairways neighborhood, roughly a mile away from the foothills.

Traci Coleman, who shared the surveillance video with News Channel 3, says she noticed a dead rat beneath a rose bush in her yard. Thinking a hawk might have dropped the animal, she checked her surveillance camera, only to find footage of a four-legged predator prowling through her backyard instead.

"At first I thought it was like a German Shepherd or some large dog that had gotten in the yard. And then I saw the black tip on the tail. And I've known from seeing them in the wild in Utah that that's a mountain lion," Coleman recounts.

She says the sighting is surprising, especially since her home is far from the foothills, where mountain lion encounters would likely be more common.

"I would expect this if I had a home backing up to the desert and the wild territory back there. That's probably part of life, living in one of those locations. But we're a good mile, two miles from the desert edge, and so that cat walked across golf courses and busy streets and leapt my six foot fence just to get in this yard," she says.

Jared Moeller, the Animal Care Curator at the Living Desert Zoo, is familiar with mountain lion behavior, but hadn't seen one explore the valley floor in his four years of experience.

"We live in their natural habitat. This is their home as well as our home. So we want to find a way to coexist," Moeller explains. To find a way to live with each other, experts recommend keeping potential food sources – like pets and small children – supervised and indoors, inaccessible to predators. When the mountain lions realize there is no prey to hunt, they will return to the mountains.

And while mountain lion sightings can be startling, Moeller thinks seeing them so far from their habitat is good news for the environment as a whole.

"It's a very unique experience. Enjoy the fact that he's come down to see to visit the valley, because that is telling us that we probably have very healthy populations up in the mountains where they normally live."