Leslie Patten Books: Wild Places, Sacred Spaces

Foraging with Bears

Posted on May 30, 2025 by Leslie

Today I took a hike along a high reef, or what they call here in NW Wyoming a “reef”, probably because at one time this limestone plateau was under one of the oceans that covered this area. It’s a flat mesa with cliffs to one side and forested ridges on the other. The soil as you can image is very thin, but allows a sparse forest of lodgepole pines and open meadows. It’s a great place to see wildflowers right now, especially before the cattle come in to free range the area.

A known place for grizzlies in the spring and fall, Wyoming Game and Fish even use this area every 4 or 5 years to set traps to collar the bears. The hike begins on a closed dirt road (not open for vehicles until mid-July to protect the bears). Elk and grizzly tracks are easily visible.

Along the way I’m tasting the tips of young fireweed. Great crunchy texture, mild flavor until the very last then there’s a bitterness. Emerging Indian Paintbrush is also edible but pretty bitter all the way through. Vast carpets of my favorite, Spring Beauties, make a great salad addition.

We’ve had a cool and rainy May, inhibiting the emergence of a lot of spring flowers. But with the recent warm days, it seems everything is out all at once. Shooting stars, usually almost gone by now, are everywhere. Their flowers are delicious along with mountain bluebell flowers, both in the borage family and have that similar taste. White flowered onions and biscuit root (lomatian) are out. Larkspur, not edible but poisonous, is emerging. Larkspur is fatal to cattle. I’ve seen some years dozens of cattle die from eating larkspur on the national forests.

Some Pasque flowers (not edible), usually done by now, are still around, some even just opening. Even Phlox is still blooming. And my favorite shrub, Buffalo berries, are just leafing out. Buffalo berries are dioecious, meaning male and female reproductive structures are on separate individual plants, not a common thing in the plant world. I also spy some American Bistort just starting to bloom. Although I’ve never tried them, their roots can be dug and eaten raw. Arrowleaf balsamroot (supposedly starvation food for Natives), strawberries and fritallaria are all blooming. Non-edibles like woodland star are blooming and elephant’s head has sent its spike up, ready to open.

Lots of Woodland star mixed with larkspur

While I forage, a bear has been busy. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on here. I think mama grizzly is clawing the bark on this tree to get at the sweet spring sap that’s flowing while her cub climbs up the tree. I’d normally say a black bear as adult grizzlies don’t climb, but this is a grizzly area and on the way up I ran into a black bear archery hunter with four llamas. He’s been camping on the reef for a few nights. He saw several grizzlies but no black bears. Black bears don’t hang around areas where there’s a lot of grizzlies.

On the plateau, a bear has been busy foraging for biscuit roots. I uses my knife to dig one up. Luckily the soil is soft since its been raining as these roots grow in tight dry soils. I have to dig pretty carefully and deep.

You can see how deep these bears have to dig in order to extract the whole root. Of course, with their long claws, that’s easy for them. Bears will till up an area with biscuit roots, a favorite treat. But they always leave some. That ensures more will come back next year.

So while we humans are foraging, bears are too. In past times, humans watched bears to see what foods were good to eat. 80% of a bear’s diet is edible for humans, The other 20% are grasses, which we cannot digest. Co-existence isn’t hard. We just have to take a cue from the bears and always make sure to leave some plants for next year’s harvest.

Filed under: New ideas | Tagged: bear-diet, Bears, edible-wildflowers, flowers, grizzlies, hiking, nature | Leave a comment »

If you must hunt, how to better manage mountain lion populations

Posted on March 27, 2025 by Leslie

Last week I attended The Mountain Lion Conference which is held every 3 years. This is the first in-person conference since 2017 because of covid. The Conference agenda is divided between presentations from biologists discussing findings from their recent studies, and state wildlife managers giving a summary of any particular aspect of their management they might choose to present.

Most of the science presented wasn’t new to me. It’s all in my book Ghostwalker: Tracking a Mountain Lion’s Soul through Science and Story. For instance, Kyle Dougherty presented studies done on California connectivity issues, discussing how the Tehachapis are critical for genetic diversity for lions there. I did extensive interviews on connectivity and the challenges in my California chapter. One interesting note was that mountain lions in that critical corridor (where there is no highway crossing yet) spent 19.8 hours on average observing, trying to decide if and where they might cross. None of their collared cats attempted crossing the highway.

Some of the most promising studies are taking place in Texas, the only western state that still lists mountain lions as “predator” status, meaning they have no seasons and no protections. Chloe Nouzille and her crew are studying the impacts of the border wall on mountain lions and other large mammals. So far they’ve found no lions crossing the wall in places where contractors place small pass throughs. These breaks are not placed in known wildlife corridors, but randomly placed about every mile. Not all contractors are doing this. Usually it’s at the request of the landowner. What the team has found is more minimal barriers such as fences were being used by lions, although these fences are too high for deer to jump over. Another Texas study was presented by Lisanne Petracca. Her team is trying to understand the genetics of western Texas lions. Are most of these lions coming from Mexico, New Mexico, or in-breed? There haven’t been studies in Texas since 2008. This renewed attention to mountain lions is very positive and hopefully will push their state legislature to make changes in lion status.

I personally had a few takeaways from Mark Vieira’s presentation on Colorado’s mountain lion female harvest presentation. Colorado doesn’t have limits for females but like most hunting states groups together their quota for both sexes for each zone. Let’s be clear: mountain lion hunting is absolutely a choice and not necessary for lion management. Lion hunting is all about hunting opportunity, not about food. But in all our Western states except California (which outlawed lion hunting through a 1990 ballot initiative. Colorado last year rejected a similar ballot initiative which would have outlawed lion hunting) that’s a fight that is a long time out.

In the meanwhile, I strongly feel good management means a female quota. And if hunting is part of the mix, then ideally the female quota should be 0 or 1 ( where there is boot hunting). Once that limited female quota is met, the zone is shut down to female take. Mountain lions are notoriously impossible to sex unless they are treed. Even then it can be difficult but a person needs to look for a black spot below the anus indicating the lion is a male.

So what has Colorado done since they have no separate quotas? First they have included discussions with houndsmen asking them to voluntarily reduce the female harvest. Second they are now reporting the amount of females taken in live time on their quota page. Third, they require a class to learn how to identify male from a female. (try taking the I.D. exam yourself) Studies have found the difference with an identification class is 10% less killing of females and with these extra minimal efforts, Colorado has reduced their female take another 10% to 39%. Most seasoned houndsmen can distinguish male from female once a cat is treed, along with recognition of track size. States like Wyoming where I live have no required class for new or out-of-state lion hunters, and don’t have a female quota.

One other note on why mountain lion trophy states should have a female quota along with classes on lion biology—mountain lion females are either pregnant, with kittens, or in estrus. If kittens lose their mother before one year old, they almost certainly will not survive. Many states, including Wyoming, do not allow hunters to kill lions traveling with other lions (which most of the time would mean they are kittens even though kittens can be as big or bigger than mom). But females frequently stash their kittens, especially ones under six months old and many times up to one year old when they go hunting.

Filed under: New ideas | Tagged: animals, Cougars, history, mountain lion conference, mountain lions, nature, travel, Wildlife | Leave a comment »

The Infamous Ben Lily

Posted on March 3, 2025 by Leslie

I’m in the Silver City area for a few weeks waiting until March 15th when I am speaking at the Tucson Book Fair. Hiking around the Gila National Forest (our first Wilderness thanks to Aldo Leopold), I can’t help but contemplate Ben Lilly.

Ben Lily features prominently in the second chapter of my latest book Ghostwalker: Tracking a Mountain Lion’s Souls through Science and Story. Lily was single-handedly responsible for the deaths of 500 mountain lions, over 600 bears, and the last grizzlies in the Southwest. He was a predator-killing machine epitomizing the hatred for predators in the early 20th century.

Today I took a short hike to what locals call Ben Lilly Pond, a 1/2 mile turn-off from Highway 15 before the Ben Lily Memorial.

The Ben Lilly Memorial plaque in the Gila National Forest against a large boulder overlook. See the lion and bear on either side

At the age of forty-five, in 1901, Lilly called his second wife and three children together, kissed them goodbye, and left them everything he owned except five dollars. Leaving his home state of Louisiana, he headed west for a land where the big predators remained. His life philosophy was now well formed. He regarded himself as the policeman of the wild, “a self-appointed leavener of nature.” Bears and lions specifically were, by their very nature, evil. Lilly considered it his biblical duty to set things straight by killing these “devil” animals. He had evolved into a religious fanatic, mixed with a special kind of mysticism. As Lilly traveled west, he left behind a wake of wildlife destruction. But his folk-hero status was growing. While hunting in Texas in 1907, Lilly received a telegram summoning him to a presidential camp on Tensas Bayou for a bear hunt with President Theodore Roosevelt.

1908 *Scribner’s* article: Theodore Roosevelt “In the Louisiana Canebrakes,” *Scribner’s* XLIII (January 1908) Courtesy Avery Island Archives, Avery Island, La.

In 1908, Lilly hunted grizzlies, mountain lions, and black bears in Mexico for three years, sending skeletons and skins back to the Smithsonian Institution. He returned to the United States, entering through the boot heel of New Mexico. Now in his mid-fifties, his predator killing career was waxing as a new era of government eradication programs for predators began. His reputation was widespread, his services were in high demand among ranchers, and he was finally well paid for a passion previously pursued only as a personal vendetta.

On the road to Ben Lilly Pond. An old ranch entrance now shot full of bullet holes

When trailing with his dogs, Lilly would forget to eat and drink, sometimes for days on end. Then he’d gorge himself on his kill and the bit of corn meal he carried with him. He never kept the skins of the animals he killed for himself, considering them a worthless piece of clothing. He was on a mission, and that intensity of focus molded him into an expert woodsman. He had no coat, but piled on layers of shirts. If he was cold, he’d build a fire, push aside the coals, and sleep on the warm ground. At least once a week he bathed in a stream, sometimes breaking away the ice, then rolling in snow to dry off. The air in a town was toxic to him, and when offered a bed, he preferred to sleep outside on the ground with his dogs.

To the men who knew him, Lilly was a man of complete honesty and character. He never swore, drank, or smoked, and famously rested on Sunday, his holy day. If his dogs treed a cougar on Saturday night, the animal had a stay until Monday morning. But his religious beliefs extended to the supernatural. Lilly’s favorite meats were bear and especially lion, which he felt would endow him with exceptional instinct, prowess, and agility to pursue his quarry. He expected no less of his dogs than he did of himself—running them for days without food. He would go out of his way to make sure they had water before he did, took great pleasure in watching them work, and valued a dog’s intelligence rather than a specific breed. Yet ultimately, they were simply tools of his trade. If a dog began running trash or quit the trail, he had no need for him, and the dog was beaten or shot to death.

Ben Lilly was unquestionably one of the most destructive figures in North American wildlife history, contributing to the demise of the grizzly bear and the wholesale reduction of mountain lions and black bears in the Southwest. The plaque above was erected by friends who knew him, back in the 1930s. But there are some folks today that revere Lily as the ultimate hunter, apparently ignorant of the havoc and destruction he left behind in the Southwest.

Walking the jeep road to the pond (which was completely dry), I did have to marvel at how this strange man maneuvered these mountains. The scrubby oaks, pines and junipers are so thick they are almost impossible to pass through. The ground is rocky and the going rough. But I wonder how many people who take these short hikes even know who Lilly was and the devastation he caused to our wildlife.

Lilly’s lack of true reverence for life is the antithesis of our values of ethical hunting and wildlife conservation—a misguided, warped sense of nature that viewed large predators as “endowed by their very nature with a capacity to wreak evil…and should be destroyed.” A misshapen, exaggerated product of his era, one could consider Lilly a vessel—a queer, half-crazed man who performed his executions as a service for others, for the government, and in his own mind, for God. Genocidal war on predators had been codified as our nation’s God-given right, and Lilly was their proxy.

If you are in Tucson on March 15th, come to the Tucson Book Fair. It’s huge with a wide variety of authors and speakers. I’ll be speaking at 10am at the Western National Parks Association Stage

Filed under: New ideas | Tagged: animals, hiking, history, travel, Wildlife | 2 Comments »

Trail Cameras

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Leslie

Trail cameras for wildlife spying have become a popular pastime. Not only has the video and photo quality improved, but the price point for high quality cameras is lower every year. I’ve been using trail cameras since around 2010. I thought it would be interesting to do a short post on my personal evolution of my use and what I’ve discovered.

Professional photographers and folks that are handy with manual camera adjustments have switched from store-bought trail cams to DSLR cameras. Using a DSLR camera trap requires a lot of knowledge of not just wildlife tracking but lighting positioning and camera settings, but the payoff is great. For my expanded Ghostwalker book out this year from University of Nebraska, even though I have thousands of great mountain lion photos and video, I needed to engage these experts for high quality photos that would reproduce in print. I’ve never been great with manual adjustments so point/shoot cameras, like trail cams, are my go-to.

Amazing capture by Jeff Wirth using a DSLR. Wirth graciously consented to let me use some of his photos in *Ghostwalker: Tracking a Mountain Lion’s Soul through Science and Story*

When I first started using trail cameras their quality was very poor, but I was mainly interested in who was visiting the nearby forest. I caught grizzly and black bears on the animal trails, along with deer, coyotes, and wolves. I was anxious to catch martens who don’t follow trails. To that end I built a box trappers use, baited it, and put a camera on it (of course I didn’t put a trap inside!). Bobcats also don’t follow trails very much and since I do have bobcat trapping in my area in winter, the animals were rare on the landscape. I hung shiny objects to attract the cats with a camera positioned on it. Still, I almost never captured a photo of a bobcat.

After two years of camera trapping, I had several epiphanies that changed the course my experiments. First, after watching trapping in my area, I became aware that my baiting was contributing to these animals becoming less wary of actual kill traps. Therefore I stopped all baiting and scenting. But the biggest revelation was how to reliably capture animals on camera.

Elk on frozen river at a crossing point. I could see the crossing using track I.D.

I had been lucky to capture several mountain lions, and found lion tracks in different areas. That piqued my interest so I attended a class on mountain lions by researcher Toni Ruth in Yellowstone. During that class I watched a video of wildlife on a mountain lion scrape site. I knew about scrapes but had never seen one nor did I know how to find them. A scrape is made by a male lion with his back feet, usually urinated on, to mark territory. Lion scrapes apparently are big attractants for all sorts of wildlife. Once I learned where to find scrapes, I sought these out and placed cameras on them. Scrapes draw almost all the prey and predators in an ecosystem. By continuing to use these same locations for over 15 years, I’ve captured amazing photos, but the real gold here is monitoring sites for so long that you get a read on the ebb and flow of wildlife activity.

(ABOVE VIDEO OF WOLVES HAD CAMERA PLACED ON A TRAIL HEAVY WITH SCRAPE SITES)

A friend who is a feline researcher told me keeping cameras at the same location for many years provides a good indication of the health of the local mountain lion population. Houndsmen and researchers use dogs to find lions, which gives a good clue to the waxing and waning of lions in a designated area. Would monitoring scrape sites alone give me a general idea of lion health?

Lions are impossible to identify. Puma concolor, their latin name, means cat of one color. Unless they have scars such as nicks in an ear, etc. they look alike. And in a hunted area, males usually don’t last long; but another young male will come to fill the void. I did get an indication that I could monitor lions this way a few years ago. In 2015-2016 we had record snows. Our mule deer population crashed. By early spring when the first grass emerged, the landscape was littered with dead deer. Predator populations lag behind prey drop, but it wasn’t long before I noticed I wasn’t catching females with kittens on my camera. Without sufficient prey, females will have smaller litters or none at all. 2017 was the last photo of a mom with young kittens. Although I did catch young dispersers, there seemed to be a dearth of females in my area until 2021. coinciding with a rebound in the mule deer population.

Additionally, the same thing was going on with cottontails and bobcats. Bobcats also visit lion scrape sites, and male bobcats like to scrape over lion scrapes. Rabbits go through seven year cycles and sometime around 2014 I noticed fewer and fewer rabbit tracks in my study area. I also stopped picking up bobcats on my cameras. The rabbit population had crashed and with it bobcat food. Then around 2020 a rabbit took up residence at one of my camera sites. Within a year, more rabbits at other sites, and soon there were rabbits everywhere. The bobcat population rebounded. Now I was catching bobcats with kittens frequently. An indication of how keeping cameras in situ for an extended period can tell the story of the land’s health.

In summary, there are many ways to use trail cams. Research, exploration, pleasure. For me it’s become a tool not just to see who is visiting, but to monitor over time the swings of the ecosystem: how weather patterns, food availability, habitat health, and natural cycles affect the wildlife in my study area.

For more videos from my trail camera captures, see my YouTube site

Filed under: Bobcats, Cougars | Tagged: animals, bobcat, Cougars, mountain lions, nature, photography, scrapes, trail-cameras, Wildlife | 3 Comments »

From the Desk of Leslie Patten: Searching for ‘One-Eye’

Posted on November 22, 2024 by Leslie

For those of you who follow my blog, I recently wrote a guest post for University of Nebraska, the publisher of my most recent book Ghostwalker, Expanded Edition.

Here is the link. Please comment at the link site, share, and enjoy the story

Filed under: New ideas | Leave a comment »

Grizzly Bears and Delisting

Posted on September 27, 2024 by Leslie

It’s pretty well known that unless you see a grizzly with cubs, its extremely difficult, if impossible, to tell male from female grizzly bears. Recently this was confirmed to me on a trip to Alaska to bear watch. We flew to a small lake contained within the vast wilderness of Lake Clark National Park. The flight took about an hour leaving from Anchorage, landed on the lake, where about fifteen of us boarded pontoons and spent the day circling the lakeshore watching grizzly bears catch salmon.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is img_8817.jpeg — Mom with 2 cubs fishing for salmon

Because these bears are in hyperphagia and also very used to the boat, we could approach quite close, say fifty feet away while the bears fished. Our boat captain was a veteran with thirteen summers under his belt of guiding and watching these bears. He knew the best spots around the lake where the fishing was good for the bears. And he told us something interesting. When we’d see a single bear (versus a mom with cubs), he had no way of knowing if that bear was a male or female. There was no size comparison to use or any other metric, and he’d been watching these bears for over a decade. In all, we saw over thirty bears in one day.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is img_8812.jpeg — Bear catches a salmon

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is img_8778.jpeg — Pontoon boats left. This small lake was where we watched grizzly bears fishing all day

That brings me to the status of grizzly bears in the Northern Rockies. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency is setting the stage to delist the Great Bear next year. Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho are actively pushing for a hunt. The local media is telling stories to encourage a hunt. (“While he doesn’t want grizzlies gone, he thinks hunting them would control their numbers and deter them from attacking people and livestock.”)

If delisting didn’t automatically include hunting, I’d be all in. We delisted bald eagles but don’t hunt them. The narrative around “a hunt” is that grizzly bears will “learn” to stay away from humans, or as the quote above, “control their numbers”.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is screenshot-2024-09-27-at-5.37.17e280afpm.png

Let’s take the second one first, “control their numbers”. Females don’t begin to have cubs until their 5th or 6th year. Cubs are born in the den the first winter, then stay with mom for 2 more winters. That brings a reproducing female to almost 10 years of age before she can hopefully replicate herself with another female. Grizzlies were the first mammal listed under the ESA in 1975. Fifteen years later, in the mid-80s, most biologists felt they were going to go extinct in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE). It took almost fifty years to go from about 200 grizzlies in the GYE to 1000 bears! Every year about fifty grizzlies are killed for a variety of reasons, mostly human caused (euthanized for livestock depredation, killed by hunters, killed by other bears. 53 so far this year 2024). Add a hunt to that and we can very quickly decimate the population once again.

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Does killing a solitary animal communicate to other solitary bears to stay away from livestock and human? There’s a sub-adult grizzly that’s been foraging clover this fall in the meadow on the Game Management Area. You can drive your car and watch that bear. If you drive too close, he runs away. But if there’s a hunt, one can legally shoot from a dirt road in Wyoming and he’s certainly close enough, and busy enough foraging, that shooting him would be like shooting fish in a barrel (which is how I see grizzlies in the fall, very absorbed in rooting around because they are in hyperphagia). An easy target for a bear hunter and would killing that sub-adult teach other bears a lesson? Of course not.

Do we need to control grizzly bear numbers? Besides the fact that in the GYE we are already killing over fifty bears a year without a hunt, if GYE grizzlies are to survive long term, they MUST connect naturally with bears in Montana (Northern Rockies). So far they haven’t done this. Wyoming’s plan is to keep killing bears on the edges, the very place where grizzlies must venture in order to connect and foster genetic diversity. Montana’s “plan” is to fly bears into the GYE to maintain genetic diversity, a completely absurd idea!

Anyone who has watched grizzly bears, and any bear biologist will tell you, that these animals are as smart (or smarter) than the Great Apes. They are on par with humans in terms of shear intelligence. Hunting them is simply painful and mean-spirited. Over 100 tribes signed a treaty against a hunt. Grizzly bears are sacred to these tribes. Moving “problem” bears to tribes that want them make more sense. As well as…

Protect your livestock, feed and garbage
Most maulings take place in the fall when hunters are prowling quietly through the woods and bears are getting ready for winter. Carry bear spray and if you are not familiar with hiking/hunting in grizzly country, there are plenty of deer and elk all over this country where there are no grizzly bears. What was shocking to me in this article was that these guys had been charged three times over the last several years. I’ve hiked in grizzly country for twenty years and haven’t had an encounter like they described. I don’t know the details of their situation, but it does make me wonder what they are doing wrong.
I certainly have sympathy for small producers who lose stock to grizzlies on public lands. But public lands are all that our wildlife have and free range cattle should be “at your own risk”, though those risks can be minimized. As noted in my previous post, the ballooning of maximum stock levels on public lands provides a reason for bears to stay low during summer months instead of ranging to higher ground. Are we just feeding these bears with easy prey? There’s been a lot of recent research on non-lethal deterrents. It’s time that the state provides support for that instead of Wildlife Services or direct compensation for losses (grizzly kills in WY are compensated at 3 times the going rate of a cow).

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is db231-grizzly-mom-and-cubs.jpg

Filed under: New ideas | Tagged: alaska, Bears, grizzly bear, Grizzly bears, Wildlife | 1 Comment »

Public Lands, Grizzly Bears, Cattle

Posted on August 26, 2024 by Leslie

I’ve got a theory. Bear with me as I tell my story.

This last June I was exploring a drainage that burned in the 1988 Yellowstone fires. There’s no trail but I’ve encountered coyotes denning farther up the draw; a place I like to go and investigate. The northeast side of the draw is filling in fast with a thick cover of young lodgepole tree. The ground, however, is a maze of burnt and rotting timber you have to clamber over.

June is when the free-ranging cattle are trucked into the valley. The major livestock producer runs several thousand head of cattle, all yearling males, which he rotates through a range of Forest Service allotments throughout the summer. Mid-June is a time when grizzly bears are foraging at lower elevations. By early July, summer heat and the lure of Army Cutworm moths drives the bears to higher elevations. These young naive yearling cattle roaming freely, especially in heavy timber, are easy Spring prey for hungry grizzlies.

The access to this side draw begins on an open hillside. Right away I notice fresh cow pies indicating that the yearlings have been here recently. As soon as I enter the dense lodgepole pine forest, something didn’t feel right. I pull my bear spray out of its holster, release the safety, and keep my dog at a heel. A large pile of grizzly scat—soupy, wet, and clearly from a meat meal—greets me amidst the tight tree cover. Then a waft of a dead animal fills my nose. The air is still but as the aroma is getting stronger, I can tell it’s coming from somewhere ahead of me. That was my cue to move swiftly to the open meadow on the other side of the creek and high-tail out of there. But I determined to return in a few months to see if what I sensed was correct. Months later in mid-August when I know the bears are up high and the cows are out of that area, I return to see if my instincts were correct. Sure, enough, in short order, after combing the timber, Hintza, my dog, easily locates the dead animal I smelled months ago. Yes, it was a cow. And yes, with all that fresh meaty bear scat, that had been a bear on it.

But this wasn’t the first freshly killed cow by a grizzly I’d encountered in the month of June. A few years ago, in an adjacent drainage, I was walking along the gravel road when I saw a strange unnatural hump of dirt and sagebrush. There were drag marks across the road as well. The dirt hump was a covered cow, freshly killed by a bear, one of the most dangerous circumstances you can come across. Bears will defend their kills. The following year and in the same area, the warden rode by on an ATV and warned me I was heading for a dead grizzly-killed cow which he was about to remove. That’s three fresh grizzly kills, a very dangerous situation for a hiker or a horseman. But every summer on hikes I run into dead cattle fully consumed after they’d been predated on—stiff hides with bones scattered.

Those of us who live and recreate in grizzly bear country are instructed to secure our food. I use a bear-proof trash can. Others in the valley keep their garbage locked in their garage. Residents are very conscious of not feeding bears. Yet putting cattle out on public lands in early spring, when grizzlies are hungry and foraging down low, seems akin to putting food out for the bears, especially young naive yearlings. Bears are smart and I’m betting grizzlies here are learning there’s a good source of easy meat. It may even be possible that instead of heading to moth sites and higher elevations, some bears are sticking around throughout the summer. Yearlings who are free-ranging, unfamiliar with the landscape and its risks, are akin to leaving easy food out for bears. That linked article discussing two relocated bears for killing cattle says “bears that are determined to be a threat to public safety are not relocated and might be killed.” But who is creating that risk? If cattle, like our garbage, are not managed correctly, we humans only have ourselves to blame.

Caught this grizzly on my camera August 2, 2024. I know this bear. He usually comes around in the fall. Here he is below in 2016 early September on ripe chokecherry bushes.

If cows are going to be free-ranging on our forests, (and I feel that livestock on public lands should be “at your own risk” as these are the only lands wildlife have) consideration needs to be given to where and when. Don’t put cattle out in June when grizzlies are down low and hungry. As an alternative, livestock trucked in in June can be placed in areas that are highly visible with a cowboy checking them frequently. Free-ranging cattle in highly populated bear areas are not only endangering the bears (Wyoming has a 3-strikes rule) and livestock, but also hikers, cyclists, horse people and other recreationists.

Two grizzlies killed by USFWS for cattle depredation in my area this summer. We have moth sites and it is unusual for bears to be down so low in August instead of at high elevation moth sites nearby. On one of these August cattle predation sites, there were four grizzlies on the carcass!

So are we training grizzlies to hang around while the pickings are easy, akin to leaving garbage out for them? I think the Forest Service, who manages timing and allotments, can do a much better job for the bears, the cattle and the people. Ironically, jurisdiction is split. The Forest Service does the range management, but it’s the Game and Fish, through state mandates, that pays producers compensation for cattle killed by grizzly bears. But I think it all comes back to the first defense of proper range management to reduce cattle and grizzly deaths. A radical thought would be to have no free-ranging cattle in grizzly country. Why not! But if the status quo must continue, then shift and limit the timing of when and where cattle are located across the forest.

Filed under: Grizzlies | Tagged: cattle, Grizzly bears, yellowstone, Yellowstone National Park | 1 Comment »

New Release: Ghostwalker: Tracking a Mountain Lion’s Soul – Expanded Edition

Posted on July 9, 2024 by Leslie

I’m very excited to announce the fall release of Ghostwalker: Tracking a Mountain Lion’s Soul through Science and Story published through University of Nebraska Press. This is an expanded edition of the independently published version in 2018. So what’s new?

A new chapter on mountain lions and desert bighorn sheep in the Southwest, a very sticky topic. Bighorn sheep are always teetering into the vulnerable category due to diseases transmitted by domestic sheep that have infected all bighorn herds throughout the Western states. But desert bighorn, who live in isolated sky islands with small herds, are particularly at risk. Predation from mountain lions is targeted as a high risk for desert bighorns. I explore and contrast management attitudes and policies towards mountain lions and bighorns in three states in particular: New Mexico, Arizona, and California. I spent time interviewing and traveling throughout the SW to better understand this gordian knot of a problem.
California! So many new things are happening with mountain lions in California. The California chapter is completely rewritten with a series of new interviews. Biologists Quintons Martins who is doing a study in Sonoma County fills us in on North Coast issues, while Justin Dellinger with CDFW dives deep into isolated populations throughout the state. Kristeen Penrod provides maps of connectors needed throughout Southern California in order to save mountain lions for the future.
What’s happening out there that’s new for mountain lions? We need a new model to replace the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. I explain what it is and why it needs updating. I speak with Wildlife for All, an organization determined to change the present wildlife management model to be more inclusive. Panthera is studying non-lethal predator protection methods in California that will help ranchers throughout the West. Plus new information on the value of mountain lions for mitigating climate change and as an indicator species.
New stories sprinkled throughout the book along with updated and new information on mountain lion research.
Lastly, almost every photo in the book has been replaced with new ones. Many thanks to several photographers who are doing camera trapping with high-end equipment. Although I have hundreds of photos of mountain lions from over 14 years of using store-bought trail cameras, these images, though great quality for the internet, do not reproduce well in a book. Several professional photographers generously donated some extraordinary photos that will appear in the new edition. Unfortunately the paperback will not be in color.

That’s a summary of what’s new. I’m so pleased to have several new endorsements for this edition.

Author Dan Flores writes: Leslie Patten has written the most fully-realized mountain lion book I have ever read. Cutting-edge science and interviews are her bedrock, but first Patten is an observer of the lion world as well as a writer whose prose pulls like a river’s current.

Jim Williams M.S., retired Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks wildlife biologist and author of Path of the Puma writes: I finished your fantastic book today. Your penchant for unedited and unbridled truth to science is amazing.

Author Ben Goldfarb writes: In Ghostwalker, Leslie Patten braids history, biology, and wildlife management to reveal this elusive cat in all its contradictory glory

I hope to do some presentations once the book comes out. If you or your organization would like to discuss this, please contact me.

Filed under: Cougars | Tagged: Cougars, mountain lions, Wildlife | Leave a comment »

What’s the Story? Cougars, Wolves, Grizzlies

Posted on May 26, 2024 by Leslie

There’s one place in my area where I’ve seen Glacier Lilies, but as soon as the melt starts the access road usually closes due to flooding. Since the weather has been cool, and next week predictions say it will be in the 70s, I decided to check out the spot to see if the lilies are up yet before the road closure. It’s a fairly remote less traveled trail and this time of year grizzlies are down low foraging while wolves are denning. The trail begins at the road’s end with a stream crossing, winds through a burnt valley before turning up a small drainage where the trail heads to a ridgeline pass.

Immediately grizzly tracks began faintly appearing on the dry ground.

When I turned into the forest drainage, the wet ground revealed two grizzly bears. That could only mean a mom and cub. The grizzly cub footprint appeared to be at least a one year old. I became more alert, unlocked my bear spray.

The area I’d seen the lilies years before was about a mile up the trail near the pass. Bear tracks followed the trail plus revealed a 2 day old scat that said they’d been eating grass mixed with fur.

Closing in on my lily hillside, I found a clear wolf print in the mud. I hadn’t seen wolf tracks earlier on the trail.

About 150 yards before the lily area , I came upon what these bears (and wolves) were doing here. An elk kill right by the trail, completely consumed but about a week or less old. Clearly a cougar kill. I searched around the site a bit. No skull, only one leg left plus the spine and pelvis.

What a cougar kill looks like. Rumen pulled out to the left. The fur in a neat circular pattern cut off with the cat’s incisors

What did the tracks and the kill sign say about the story here? Of course, the only thing I can be certain of was this elk was killed by a cougar. But let’s think about what might have happened. Wolves and bears (grizzlies and black) push lions off their kill. With only one leg, and few fresh wolf prints, I imagined the wolves kicked the lion off the kill site, and hauled the other legs off, maybe to their den site over the ridge. The wolves probably consumed most of the elk before the grizzly mom and cub came along (their tracks fairly fresh) to finish off what was left. The fresh wolf track I found was probably a wolf returning to check on any left-overs, and maybe even encountering the grizzlies.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find my Glacier Lilies. Maybe just too early or maybe those bears ate them. But here is some other cool bear sign I found along the trail.

Bears use their claws to strip bark from a tree, then feed on the sapwood by scraping it from the heartwood with their teeth.

To learn more about mountain lions and their interactions with wolves and bears, read my upcoming book Ghostwalker: Tracking a Mountain Lion’s Soul through Science and Story out this fall University of Nebraska Bison Books. To pre-order a copy and receive a 40% discount, go to this link and use the code 6AF24

Filed under: Cougars, Grizzlies, Tracking, Wolf | Tagged: animals, Bears, Cougars, Grizzly bears, mountain lions, nature, Tracking, travel, Wildlife, Wolf | Leave a comment »

Mountain Lion News

Posted on May 6, 2024 by Leslie

I recently attended a presentation by Wyoming Game and Fish large carnivore biologist Luke Ellsbury on, what else, large carnivores. I was mostly interested to know any results from Justin Clapp’s study on CWD and mountain lions. The field research is done but the analysis hasn’t been published yet. Luke confirmed that mountain lions were definitely targeting CWD deer and elk.

Another study measured the amount of prions in scat from mountain lions intentionally fed CWD infested deer meat. On the first defecation, the meat contained only 3% prions. And no detection on defecations after that. Luke said with these results in hand, the Service is definitely looking at adjusting mountain lion quotas in areas where they want to target reducing CWD in deer and elk. They are also planning on repeating this study with other predators—wolves and bears—and are presently testing CWD meat on bobcats in the field.

The study also corroborated findings from Elbroch’s Jackson study that as lions age they tend to prey switch to elk more heavily. That means if WGF wants to reduce elk CWD through mountain lion predation, reducing hunt quotas will allow more older mountain lions on the landscape. The critical age for prey switching seems to be five years old.

In other more personal mountain lion news, Luke confirmed for me that my one-eyed female lion was not harvested this year. In my area which is the northern end of Hunt Area 19, only one female was harvested this winter. I showed Luke the last video I captured of one of One-Eyed cubs. I thought he looked pretty rough. Luke agreed he didn’t look in good shape, confirming to me that most likely the mother and other cub are dead. And this cub, probably a male because he was always the bigger of the two cubs, isn’t likely to survive either. Cubs under one year old that lose their mother have a very low survival rate as they haven’t developed their hunting skills yet.

Lone Kitten of One-Eye captured early March 2024

Luke told me that this winter one lion was killed by wolves in my area, and that he had a call about another lion recently killed by wolves. Lions in my area aren’t collared, so these would be lions that hunters or hikers encounter and report. We’ve also had one report of a mountain lion dying of bird flu in the North Fork area of Cody.

Happier times. One-eye with her family in December 2023

I’ll continue to check cameras and hope to see One-Eye. I’ve followed her since she arrived in my area in 2021 as a young lion. She was probably born with her blindness. This was her second litter and I thought she was going to be really successful. The last time I saw the family together, those cubs looked happy and healthy at probably around seven or eight months old. Life is definitely rough out in the wild.

To pre-order the expanded edition of Ghostwalker out this fall, and to be receive a 40% discount, go to https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9781496238474/ and enter code 6AF24