Yesterday I hiked to one of my trail camera sites planning on retiring the camera for the summer. Because our deer and elk migrate into the high country around Yellowstone starting in May, there is little action with large predators. Grizzly bears start to disappear around early July. On the east side of Yellowstone in the high elevation cirques of the Absarokas, moth sites feed the bears. Cougars are following our deer which make one of the longest migrations in the ecosystem. Wolves probably completed denning and will be taking their pups to rendezvous sites with a babysitter or two, while the other adults forage for food.
Cougar print at 10,000 feet early June in the Beartooths. Lions are following the migrating elk
So you can imagine my surprise when I looked at my camera videos. My newest male cougar is still hanging around, marking his territory with scrapes. He appears to have beat off another large male that has one eye, the other probably lost in a fight. One-eye was last seen at the end of March.
New male in the area. Notice he has eyeshine in both eyes, distinguishing him from One-Eye
Even more exciting, I caught a mating pair of grizzlies. By the time of the year, and the fact that these are two adults, you can be sure this video is a male following a female in estrus.
Large male grizzly. See video link for full story
In summer, when grizzlies disperse for high elevations, the black bears take over. Male black bears will make sure to display who is boss by tree rubbing, destroying cameras, and stomping which also puts down their scent. Interestingly, grizzlies know they are the real top of the food chain and could care less about cameras, although they do rub trees, both males and females. Here is a video of a grizzly female with two cubs spending time tree marking with her cubs following suit.
Mama Grizzly. See video link for story
On a very interesting note, I camera-captured two blonde animals this spring—a fox and a black bear—both fairly rare. To understand this in greater depth, I contacted Jim Halfpenny, well-known mammalogist and tracker. Jim told me he had never seen a fox this blonde, whether at fur sales or in the field. He thought maybe this fox could be a fur farm escapee, but in my inquiries we haven’t had a fox farm in the Big Horn Basin since 1996, plus I live in the high mountains next to Yellowstone so the mystery continues. In addition I’ve never had a fox show up at this location before. This little blonde red fox continued to visit this site over the course of several months, which adds to the mystery.
Blonde phase Red Fox. See the entire video via link above
The blonde phase black bear is also unusual around these parts. Halfpenny told me he had only seen one briefly around the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and never as blonde as this one. Color phases of black bears are not unusual, but the blonde phase is the rarest. Here is a link to an interesting breakdown of color phases of black bears in North America. Although it is presented by a hunter, it is informative. I do NOT support any trophy hunting, but I encourage you to watch this for information. No actual hunting is in the video.
A large carnivore biologist who I showed the videos to had an interesting thought. “Wonder if this is a genetic expression due to the initiation of climate change,” he wrote me. Thinking outside the box leads to interesting possibilities.
Blonde phase Black Bear. See video via link above
Finally, my new book Shadow Landscape is now available on Amazon. These are stories of wildlife encounters I’ve wanted to tell for a long time. I appreciate all my readers and followers. Thanks for your interest in our iconic wildlife.
“Under the aegis of wildlife management, the oxymoron that is now a fact of life for most North American creatures, spins unbounded tinkering, with further tinkering made necessary by past tinkering, effects of causes, effects of causes — a “cascade of consequences” precipitated by human intervention, well intended though it may be.” —Ellen Meloy
San Andres ewe 067 was languishing on a rocky hillside, chewing on tufts of grass when she heard the far-off noise of a chopper. She hated helicopters. She’d already been netted and captured once. That was when she was four years old. The biologists collared, tested and treated her for scabies, a disease that was killing her sheep compadres. During the capture she broke her leg. Although her leg mended, she hadn’t forgotten the noise associated with the trauma. Spotting the helicopter in the distance, she darted uphill into a covey of rocks. The helicopter passed without seeing her.
Desert bighorn ram in Utah
Before the arrival of the market hunters killing sheep to feed railroad workers and miners, before settlers trailed thousands of sheep into Texas and New Mexico, this eighty-five-mile rib of northward trending rock called the San Andres Mountains was prime habitat for desert bighorn sheep. Biologists describe it as a metapopulation: sheep that travel from one range to another, following fluctuations in weather patterns and forage. The home range of ewe 067, probably held the largest population of desert bighorns in the southern Chihuahuan desert of New Mexico. Unhindered by human interference, sheep connected north through the a desert gap into the Oscura Mountains and southward into the Organ Mountains. With the arrival of livestock that brought disease, overgrazing, and unregulated hunting, the sheep died off. By the 1940s only a small remnant bighorn population lived here.
To save the desert bighorns, the San Andres National Wildlife Refuge was created in1941. Only thirty-three sheep remained, mostly in the southern half of the range. White Sands Missile Range was created in 1945, encompassing the Refuge within 3500 square miles. Seven days later, the first atomic bomb exploded on the northern edge of the military testing site. In a fortuitous quirk of isolation, the Refuge was now surrounded by a huge tract of land, with no public visitation or livestock. The bighorns flourished. The military never used the ground, just the air space, and the sheep eventually habituated to the screeching sounds of jets and missile launches.
White Sands Missile Range. The small green outline is the San Andres National Wildlife Refuge
By the mid-1960s the herd grew to over 200 sheep. Yet living on an island has its limitations, even with those high levels of protections from human interference. Island populations are subject to genetic drift, disease outbreaks, forage decline and weather changes. Within the next ten years, by 1979 the herd crashed to around eighty animals and kept declining from there. By the time ewe 067 was born in 1989, only about 35 bighorns comprised her herd. The culprit of the crash was determined to be a scabies-mite infestation, its origin a mystery, but the main suspect of transmission was domestic goats and sheep. Scabies causes incessant itching, hair loss, ear drum damage, loss of hearing and upset equilibrium. The scabies left the sheep vulnerable to contagious ecthyma, a viral disease that causes scabby lesions on the mouth and can lead to blindness, lameness, impaired feeding and starvation. This disease complex, if it didn’t kill a sheep outright, predisposes them to death by other causes such as predation, bacterial infections, falls from precipices.
Now in the winter of 1996, seven year old ewe 067 ran for cover from the helicopter. Meanwhile, two other choppers were also surveying the Refuge. In 15 hours of survey time, not one sheep was observed. The following year the concerted effort was repeated, but this time 067 was on a naked bluff. She was captured, collared and treated for scabies. San Andres ewe 067, the lone remaining native desert bighorn in the Chihuahuan desert, now became known nationwide as “the last ewe.”
067 was born on an isolated protected perch with a wide view. Her mother probably sought out rugged terrain for protection from lions, eagles and coyotes. As the ewe dropped her newborn, an intensive study on mountain lions was taking place within her home range. From 1986 through 1996, Kenneth Logan and Linda Sweanor collared, followed, and documented mountain lions in the Refuge. Bighorn sheep had been listed by the state of New Mexico as endangered in 1980, so although their focus was mountain lions, they agreed to include sheep predation monitoring as well. During the years of the study, the mule deer thrived, so lion kills were mostly opportunistic and compensatory. Of forty-three collared sheep during their ten year tenure, twenty-six died, ten from lion kills. Yet after the study was completed, the mule deer population crashed, and mountain lions were hunting farther and wider for food. With the added predation, along with a small, weakened diseased population, all the sheep disappeared.
All but our last ewe. Ewe 067 watched sheep around her drop, get eaten by lions, or fall off cliffs while she found safe areas to forage. For two years 067 lived alone. For a herd animal, she must have become extra vigilant. Ewes in particular like to live high, combing for good escape habitat, a survival instinct honed to protect their lambs. Sheep have excellent vision. Even at ten years of age, hers must have been highly acute.
Ewe 067 never had much luck with humans. Now easily located with a telemetry collar, during her third capture in 1999 she was placed in a paddock by a guzzler for a week. Bashing her horns against the enclosure, she broke one off.
Possibly 067’s luck with humans was about to change. New Mexico Game and Fish was beginning a new bighorn sheep transplant program. The Refuge with its historical evidence of a large herd of sheep was on its radar to be next. Yet the scabies transmission was scaring them. How was it communicated—did it stay in the soil? Was it through direct contact? A test was devised to see if the Refuge was safe. The NMDGF brought in six “Sentinel” rams in 1999 from Red Rock Wildlife Refuge, a 1,250-acre fenced enclosure in southwest New Mexico where they were raising bighorn sheep for seed stock. The rams were sprinkled on various ranges, used as canary-in-the-coal-mine sheep. They waited two years to see if they died. When all the Sentinels lived, additional transplants were brought in from Red Rock, along with sheep from the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona. Between 2001 and 2005, fifty more sheep were brought in from Kofa along with a few more from Red Rock.
The San Andres Mountains as viewed from White Sands National Park
Three years after her capture in the paddock, 067 was spotted with a lamb. One of the Sentinel rams had found her. At thirteen, this feisty survivor had birthed again. She beat scabies, lions, capture, and the terrible fate of aloneness for a herd animal dependent on others.
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“Hintza, come!” I’m keeping my ten-month-old golden retriever close. We’re walking dry washes in the southern New Mexico Chihuahuan desert, looking for mule deer, and I just spotted some javelinas on a nearby scrubby slope. Javelinas don’t like dogs and have been known to kill them. Really, Lindsay Smythe, my hiking partner, is doing most of the work. I’m just tagging along, holding my recorder out, navigating around creosote bushes and rocky terrain trying to keep up and corral the pup. Smythe is the San Andres Wildlife Refuge manager, here helping her friend and fellow lead biologist Ron Thompson on this four-day project. Smythe points out what javelina scat looks like. “Kind of like cattle droppings.” It’s everywhere now that I recognize it. Seeing Hintza, the javelinas deposit some fresh scat to confirm.
I was invited to spend a few days on Ted Turner’s Armendaris Ranch with a small team of biologists as they completed an annual deer survey. The Armendaris, a desert property bordering the Rio Grande by Elephant Butte Reservoir, is over 350 acres of untouched land Turner has reserved for wildlife. It’s impressive and vast private land that stretches across the desert basin east to the San Andres, encompassing the Jornada del Muerto, a name given to the basin by the Spanish for its waterless expanse. The Fra Cristobal mountains hug the reservoir and western edge of the basin. They’re a small range, not terribly high, but their classic crags and high mesas are good sheep habitat, though it’s debatable whether they ever held sheep historically. Looking east, the San Andres appear far in the distance, a long wall of mountains. To the south, much closer, lie the less formidable Caballo mountains, shrouded in clouds suspended above the desert floor.
San Andres mountains far in the distance, looking from the Fra Cristobals
I’m actually here at the invitation of Ron Thompson, big cat biologist. These days Thompson mainly spends his time on jaguars in Mexico as president of the Primero Conservation nonprofit. But he still continues his contract work for the Turner Endangered Species Fund. He helped restore these bighorn sheep and continues research here on adaptive mountain lion management strategies, his most recent being water. It was through his work collaring lions on the Kofa that he met Smythe.
Deer, being the primary lion food, it’s important to keep tabs on how they are doing with an annual study. Deer health bodes well for sheep longevity. The summer of 2020 was especially hard on all wildlife. The monsoons never arrived. Thompson tells me forage on the ranch is in poor shape.
“The habitat is private land and so the ranch manager is responsible for maintaining healthy habitat. It’s not healthy now. We’re in a drought and the main browse component is way overused. I’m telling him your plants are dying. And the deer are declining because of the competition.”
Thompson points me to a nearby hillside where a series of lines demarcate the slope.
“That’s from desert sheep going back and forth. That used to be all grass. It’s been denuded. All been eaten and the sheep aren’t there anymore. Those are the visual impacts I’ve seen in twenty years of being here. But you can’t just come here, look at the mountain, and say, where are the sheep. They’re here and they continue to have an impact.”
Thompson says the deer fawn recruitment is down 10%. That’s why he’s brought this small team to comb, section by section, the Fra Cristobal range. Today, Smythe and I observe one buck, one set of coyote tracks, and several dozen javelina. The sheep are higher up so we don’t expect to see them on this route. Smythe tells me the lower area of the mountain is poor deer country so she’s not surprised at our limited success.
Smythe is the perfect person to discuss sheep and lions with. She’s been the sole biologist and manager of the Refuge for two years. Before that she worked at Kofa National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona, and at the Desert National Wildlife Refuge (DNWR) near Las Vegas, another sheep refuge surrounded by Nellis Airforce base. Kofa is the main supplier of desert bighorn transplants for Arizona with currently over 900 sheep. The DNWR has 900 sheep.
Kofa National Wildlife Refuge (USF&W Photo)
Kofa National Wildlife Refuge had a precipitous drop in their sheep population in the early 2000s, from over 800 animals to 400. This was before any awareness of Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae. Since Kofa was providing the majority of the sheep transplants throughout Arizona, alarm bells went off. Meanwhile, for years Kofa had been developing more and more artificial water sources specifically for sheep. In fact, the increase was phenomenal. Arizona had 750 managed waters in 1997 for wildlife. By 2019, the state was managing over 3,000. It was through trail cameras set at water developments in the Kofa that managers noticed an increase of mountain lions.
“In that portion of the state, southwestern Arizona, it had very low to no mountain lions historically. A mountain lion might come through, be seen, but it wasn’t a regular occurrence.” Amber Munig, big game program management supervisor for Arizona Game and Fish tells me.
“And we had relatively no mountain lion harvests in that portion of the state for decades. We started to see mountain lions in there, and at one point we had over 14 mountain lions within the Kofa complex itself.”
Arizona Game and Fish sprang into action. Sensitive to public opinion, the Agency created a mountain lion predation management plan. They collared sheep and every mountain lion they could snare. The policy said that if a mountain lion killed two sheep within a six-month period, that lion was removed. If it only killed one, it was left alone, or if it was two outside of the six months, then it went free.
“We had this very strict approach for dealing with mountain lions killing bighorn sheep.” Munig says.
Smythe’s employment from 2005 through 2011 at the Kofa coincided with the sheep drop. She helped push for control limits in their management plan. The idea was the plan would target any lions that showed a clear affinity for killing sheep.
“My opinion is that a lot of the declines (at Kofa) attributed to predation—the real root cause was disease. For a long time we weren’t testing for it at all. When I was at Kofa we had six mountain lions collared, and there were definitely some males that killed a lot of sheep. There was one that killed six sheep within the span of a few months. But the problem is every time you had a mountain lion kill sheep, it was killed. No one has ever left mountain lions collared long enough to really understand the interaction very well. Everybody starts panicking, and that’s what happened in our lion study at Kofa.”
Smythe explains that “the intent was to kill offending lions that had really learned how to target bighorn sheep. But it turned out that all the lions met that criteria very quickly and so they ended up killing all of them.” It’s the rare mountain lion that actually shows a clear preference for one prey or another. Usually, it’s an opportunistic kill while hunting for their preferred prey, deer. In Logan and Sweanor’s study only one lion in ten years demonstrated a clear affinity for sheep. He was removed.
Kofa’s predation management plan area was vast. The borders were delineated at highway 35 to the east, i-10 to the north, i-8 as the southern boundary, and west to the California border. The argument was “you can’t just kill lions in the mountain range because lions migrate in from other places.” So dispersers were killed too. Because it takes ten to fifteen years for a herd to rebound from a disease epidemic, it might have eventually cycled out of the infection on its own. It may have happened faster with lion removal, but, as Smythe reiterates, “the problem is they never do research. Everybody starts to panic and the lions always end up losing.”
The Plan did have a shut off valve. When the population reached 800, mountain lion killing would end. In 2019 that target population was reached, with over 900 animals in the Kofa, thus ending lion culling, a good fifteen years since the plan’s inception. The AZGF is still monitoring the collared lions for data purposes, but there is no longer removal of lions.
As we circle around an enormous obstacle of prickly pear cactus, Smythe argues that if every lion is killed in a treatment area, “they have no way of knowing if that’s what caused the rebound or not.”
Smythe reminds me that in 2002, twenty sheep were imported into San Andres from the Kofa herd, and another thirty in 2005.
“We know the Kofa decline was caused by disease because when they transplanted the bighorns from Kofa to San Andres, they all came down with Mycoplasma. When we tested them, we strain-typed it, and it’s the same strain. It is the Kofa strain that killed my sheep. All these declines that we’ve had were more than likely disease. Predation may have compounded that.”
Lions, like wolves, are good at sensing the weak and sick in a herd. Compromised animals are easier prey than healthy. An entire herd of sick animals may be like an open market for a lion.
Smythe feels the models for sheep management may be in the San Andres and Desert National Wildlife Refuge. The DNWR has never had lion management, yet they’ve also had deep disease dips along with rebounds. The San Andres did have a period of state lion controls when the animals were listed as state endangered and reintroduced into the Refuge in the 2000s. An environmental assessment was done and offending lions were to be removed. Over a ten year period around thirty lions were culled. But that plan sunsetted and there hasn’t been any active lion removal since. With the last visual aerial count at 170 animals, the Refuge population is doing fine, probably around carrying capacity.
San Andres sheep population over the course of the Refuge
Smythe’s recount of no testing going on during the Kofa decline is accurate. Arizona came particularly late into the disease monitoring game, probably starting only eight years ago. Yet during the early 2000s this was the situation throughout the West. Sheep biologists had been chasing sheep diseases for decades, but the science wasn’t there yet. Everything was cultured, which is unreliable for identifying and differentiating finicky pathogens.
“We were clueless,” Mike Cox of Nevada Department of Wildlife told me. “We didn’t want to be clueless but we didn’t have the science behind it. We didn’t have any money. Nobody cared. There’re no huge grants working on bighorns. We were blind of what was really causing the issue, just a lot of ideas and theories…It was a big circle-jerk for decades.”
In 2009, more than 2,000 bighorn died throughout the Western states.
“No one understood what was going on. People were thinking it was sunspots,” Cox told me, joking to emphasize how blindsided sheep biologists were.
Finally, a breakthrough occurred in the lab. Thomas Besser, a clinical veterinarian pathologist from Washington State University along with a few others, were able to isolate and identify the ringleader of sheep bacteria, Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae. Although there are several other bacteria living dormant in sheep, with their defense mechanisms intact, they can fight those off. But Mycoplasma destroys those immunities.
All this was happening sight unseen in the Kofa sheep die-off in the early 2000s. Now, in retrospect, game agencies can look back and see the real culprit.
Amber Munig pieced it out for me. “What we believe happened is that we had a disease episode that went through the Kofas which affected lamb recruitment and probably an all age class die-off. At the same time, we were seeing some expansion of mountain lions, some from south and some from east. We don’t know exactly why. Our deer and javelina populations were relatively stable at that time.”
“We had predation increasing, something we hadn’t had in the past for this population, occurring when the population was depressed. With our predation management and time allowing animals to clear any pathogens that were holding on within the population, it allowed for that population to recover. I think it was a combination of time and our very focused effort to not allow predation to keep suppressing that population.”
Yet the question still remains as to why the lion population in the Kofa complex increased from almost zero to fourteen animals. Ron Thompson has thoughts on the answer. Along with several other researchers, Thompson conducted a simple, yet elegant long-term study placing camera traps at water catchments spanning all three southwest deserts—Mohave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan—including traps in the Kofa. Using data collected over years, the study revealed bighorn sheep using water catchments at limited times of the year, specifically the driest, hottest season. In the Sonoran Desert, where the Kofa traps were located, 85% of all desert bighorn sheep visits occurred during May through August. Bighorns have been evolutionarily adapted to get their water from their food. In the winter, they can kick barrel cacti over and chew the pulp. Predators on the other hand, need year-round water sources. Thompson found “desert bighorn sheep concentrated their visits to water within 4-5 summer months across all 3 deserts. Mountain lions visited water year-round in the Chihuahuan and Mojave deserts, and generally year-round in the Sonoran.”
The research concluded that “managed waters allow populations of desert bighorn sheep to inhabit areas they previously had not. Indeed, this outcome forms justification of managing waters for desert bighorn sheep. It follows that managed waters could enable mountain lions to inhabit locations they previously had not…”
Thompson reminds me to “keep this association in mind”—the increase in the number of photos of lions at water developments in the Kofa. “That,” meaning the lion numbers increase he says, “was suspected as the smoking gun cause for the decline.”
Day two of the mule deer survey I’m out on my own with Hintza. I suppose the researchers feel I’ve gotten the hang of walking and looking for deer. I’m combing a long wide wash that runs through a deep ravine. Two others are hiking the high ridges above. I’m assigned to not only look for deer, but scout for lion tracks. Before I set out, Thompson checked a trail camera located on a water source pinch point here. No lions had come by.
Although it hasn’t rained for weeks, maybe months, a tiny spring emerges through the rough rocks to fill a sandy hole. Hintza gets to quench his thirst. I see javelina tracks everywhere along the sandy bottoms. They resemble small versions of deer tracks set closer together in stride. A few deer tracks but none in the flesh appear. A large lizard suns itself on the hot rocks.
Hintza, my 10 month old pup on the Armendaris
The canyon is stark and beautiful, with gleaming bare stone along the base, sparse desert plants as the hillsides rise steeply above. I’m a plantofile, though unfamiliar with New Mexico, I don’t know many of these plants. I pause to admire a Dasylirion as it is unfurling. Sometimes mistaken for a yucca but they are unrelated. I know it from my days as a landscape designer in Northern California.
At one point I spot Thompson’s son who is assisting with the study. A small speck walking along the high rims, sky lining like a bighorn sheep. The canyon opens and ends at a water development with a rough dirt road leading to it. My assignment is to keep walking up the road and connect to another dirt road where we’ll all meet. As I’ve heard so much about water catchments during my time in the southwest, I spend time studying how this one works.
Unfortunately, for the bighorn, the story does not end with water developments, predator controls, or the recent uncovering of Mycoplasma as their vulnerability to respiratory infection. The beat goes on and we just do not know how to stop it.
Thompson told me over last night’s dinner how he has applied the data from his research. The idea was to allow sheep and deer to drink, but not lions. Sheep and deer have narrow faces, lions have round faces. Those face measurements are known to any researcher. But how long is a lion’s tongue? A key question for a cat that can lap through bars. Since Thompson spends lots of time capturing and collaring lions, it was just one additional measurement. The design he came up with was a trough with pipe laid vertically just wide enough for a lean sheep nose, and water depth just below a lion’s tongue reach. Water for thirsty deer and sheep, yet a deterrent for lions in waterless country. If water isn’t available, lions and other predators will have to search far and wide, leaving the sheep, who are less water-dependent, alone.
Johnson’s ingenious water drinker just for sheep and deer
That predators kill prey is the simplest of biological equivalents, known to any high-schooler. But the intricate dance of nature is a puzzle that humans have difficulty teasing out even absent our interference. Yet nature has been so tinkered with, trampled on, and altered by humans, that when one adds our own unintended consequences to the fluidity of natural factors like climate, habitat, and disease, sorting out cause becomes a veritable soup. To save an animal from extinction, we now find it necessary to trade wildness for rescue interventions.
Bighorn sheep petroglyph on the east side of the Missile Range in the Tularosa Basin
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There’s so much more to this story. Stay tuned for Part III
A few days ago I found a pile of freshly collected dirt and pine needles under a large fir. It had the obvious signs of the only animal around here that covers its scat–felines.
I pushed aside the dirt and found cougar scat, so fresh that it was obvious this cat had just killed and eaten.
Fresh Cougar Scat
In researching my book, Ghostwalker, expert cougar biologist Toni Ruth described to me a typical lion-kill scene—the cougar will drag his kill usually under a tree and cover it. This aides in hiding the smell to keep scavengers away and helps keep it fresh.
A deer can take several days to consume. The cat eats, sleeps and sets up a latrine nearby. Sometimes cougars will just eat the organs and leave. They need the nutritious organs since they lost the ability somewhere in evolutionary time to convert carotenoids like beta carotene into Vitamin A.
Buck in velvet killed by mountain lion. Lion covered the kill after it had entered through the rib cage and eaten the organs
Armed with this knowledge, I began hunting around in an ever-widening circle looking for the kill site. Yet I found nothing. Giving up, I walked into the nearby forest where a light wet snow still covered the ground from the previous evening. There I found the cat’s prints.
I backtracked the cougar, who had crossed through several properties. I found the kill, a young buck, close to a garage whose owners are absentee most all the year.
I could see the cat had entered through the rib cage (typical) and only eaten out the organs so far. I ran home and placed a trail camera at the kill site.
My home is amongst a small cluster of 6-9 acre properties, all bordering National Forest. The valley is a patchwork of a few large ranches interspersed with public lands.
Most everywhere one looks is National Forest. A few miles directly west are the Absaroka mountains, the border of Yellowstone National Park. Deer are getting ready for their annual walk-about, following the green-up to the high country of Yellowstone.
They are a bit late this year as it’s been cold, green-up a bit late, and the snows still deep where they are headed, so bucks and does are still hanging around, many close to homes.
The Basin in early winter from the pass. Public lands in all directions.
Another neighbor who owns a large horse ranch told me they’d spotted a young grizzly scouting their hay fields not far from this cat’s hidden kill.
It got me wondering if the bear would bounce the cougar off his kill. Cougars are subordinate predators, and bears kick them off their kills 50% of the time. A bear can smell a carcass up to 20 miles away. I was betting on the bear.
Young grizzly in the meadows by my house
But I had other questions. First, this cougar seemed to be acting somewhat like cougars that live in urban-wildland settings–its latrine was about 1/4 mile away and not used over and over; it was coming and going to its kill, returning only under cover of darkness.
With most homeowners gone in early spring, I believe this cat would have acted different. But this is Memorial Day weekend, and some of the nearby vacation homes are occupied. Even the usually vacant property where the deer stashed the kill, the owners had come out from the east coast for the weekend. Additionally, noise factor on the dirt road for the holiday weekend was spooking the cat.
So I asked myself “Would this cat return to its kill to finish up or just be satisfied with the organs it already ate?” “Would the grizzly bear overtake it?” I waited a few days and went to retrieve the memory card in the camera.
3:45 a.m. First visitor: A lone coyote stays for about 15 minutes
First visitor to the kill site
4:30 a.m. Cougar shows up. Leaves 40 minutes later
9:28 p.m. Cougar returns. Leaves and comes back at 2:15 a.m. next morning.
Here the cougar is re-burying it’s kill with its back legs.
So after the initial kill and eating the organs, this cougar has returned three times over the course of two nights. The bear apparently has moved on down the valley, more interested in grass and grains than meat. If this was fall, that bear would have definitely been on the carcass during hyperphagia.
Today was warm. This carcass was buried in a wet swampy area amidst trees. The flies were on it, but there is still plenty of meat. So now I wonder if that cougar will return again, even with the flesh beginning to spoil a bit. Or will the bear be back? Coyotes for sure, and maybe some wolves will come by as they are feeding pups now. I added another camera that takes video, so, To be continued…
Reviewing my photos. 3rd day and it is warm (63 degrees). The cougar wasn’t able to cover the carcass very well due to location and there are flies on it, but still plenty of meat.
I gave a presentation at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, WY. With excellent quality equipment, the museum video taped the presentation. About 45 minutes if you want to watch it: https://youtu.be/l2TMldiC4-w
What didn’t get into my new book Ghostwalker: Tracking a Mountain Lion’s Soul through Science and Story? A lot of fascinating information trackers, researchers, and others told me just couldn’t squeeze into the narrative. Here are some excerpts from interviews with trackers and a researcher I interviewed.
From Jim Sullivan, Sonoma County Tracker:
Our language causes us to think that when you say something you really ‘have’ it. It’s always in flux. I’ve studied lots of science, and one thing that’s really important to understand is that things don’t follow laws. Laws are like a grid we put on it in order to understand what’s happening. Not necessarily the way it is, it’s how it moves.
I’ll tell you a little about my teaching in my class. I teach a traditional native style tracking. The native trackers tracked in sacred time and I started asking myself what that meant and what their spiritual life was like. What I understand about it is to make it into a spiritual practice and a meaningful part of your life, you got to look at tracking as a metaphor. So all the different things you do in tracking actually took place at a time when our neo-cortex was forming 2 million years ago. Our brain is designed to work that way because it came into being in order to solve tracking problems. You know how in tracking you have the four views? You have the eagle’s view, then you have the standing view, the kneeling view, and you are also instructed to go around the object so you can see it from different lights. That’s a metaphor to learning anything. A way of expressing it is that you have to look at everything from all the different sides. Most people tend to have kind of a laser focus. They know one version of it real well and then they speak with authority about it. But you’re not really an authority until you know all the main opinions. So that’s how I look at tracking. Even applying that to mountain lions. Things change depending upon your point of view, and also your presence and also other presences. When you make statements about wolves are a certain way, bobcats are a certain way, you have to do that, but it’s just a grid you’re putting on what the animals are actually doing. Takes the edge off it.
Matt Nelson told me how they set traps and tracked on Mark Elbroch’s Colorado study:
It was pretty neat. We would set these traps where the cat had to set its foot exactly where you wanted it. It would jerk a little cable snare tight around its wrist and the cat was stuck there. One of the neat things about these methods nowadays is they have transmitters on them, both cage traps and snares. So as soon as that animal was captured, we’d get a signal on our radio and we would hustle in there and minimize the time that animal was trapped. Those were the three methods: Hounds, cage traps and snares.
The sooner we could get cameras into a kill, the more information we could get. We’d try and recognize the GPS data. We got pretty good; we knew the cat was on a kill the very next morning. We’d hike in there real quick. Typically you never saw the cat. But what we started doing was we started sneaking in. Real quietly and just trying to see them. And sure enough, we started seeing them. We’d watch a mama creep out with kittens and sneak away from us. Then we’d go back to the GPS data, and you’d see she had walked out a little ways, wait for us to leave, then walk right back down to their kill, the next hour. GPS collars are very accurate within a meter, but hand-held ones are not that good. Every time we walked into a kill was a tracking adventure. We’d find where the animal came in, and try to read the story of the kill as best we could depending upon what kind of sign there was. Then we’d piece it all together amongst ourselves. It was a lot of fun. I learned a lot in those months. Science is invasive. Darting an animal and collaring it is extremely invasive. Mark’s idea was if we’re going to be invading an animal’s life this much, let’s get all we can. Let’s make it pay as best we can to honor the cat.
I worked one winter and part of one summer. Obviously the snow holds tracks, but sometimes we were in waist deep snow and its not easy. In the summertime, if the substrate was good, we’d go out, take numerous GPS points from where the cat had been the previous day. We’d start at one point and trail the animal, and if we ever lost it we’d know know where to pick it up at the next GPS point. Sometimes you could follow an animal a great distance if the substrate was good and the conditions right. GPS was back up in case we lost the trail.
Jim Halfpenny, mammalogist and tracker from Gardiner Montana told me lots of great tracking stories:
This track measures 3″x3″ approx.
My real interest in cougars started in 1982; I got called into Nederland, CO. A bear had mauled a horse inside the town of Nederland. Forest Service called me and I went in and looked at it. I looked around a little bit and I said This is not a bear that mauled a horse. It’s a cougar. Which really shocked people; a cougar in the middle of town. On the edge of the horse there were five claw marks, and Forest Service said it has to be a bear it has five claws. On a cougar, the dew claw doesn’t show on a print and it’s not bone attached, it’s tendon attached. It’s called the killer claw because it will wrap around something. If you ever have a house cat wrap around, you’ll get five marks. And the claw marks were thin not fat. Hey guys, I’m sorry. Cats leave five claw marks, you don’t realize this. I went home that night and started thinking about it. What is a cougar doing in a town? That’s what started a project.
Research ecologist Peter Stine based out of Northern California worked with Carl Koford who did some of the original estimates on mountain lion populations in the 1980s using track lines. Koford drove hundreds and hundreds of miles of dirt roads around the state to determine tracks per linear mile. Here Peter talks with me about fisher populations in the Southern Sierras and mountain lions:
We started the study because the fisher is a forest carnivore, and the assumption is that fisher population are affected by forest management. We wanted to better understand how many fisher are there and how they are relating to their habitat. There’s a detailed study that was started just south of Yosemite. To cut to the chase, turns out the number one cause of mortality is predation and mostly mountain lions. Typically it appears they’re killing them but not eating them. Why and what’s the impact of predation on the fisher population? Fishers in the southern Sierra are very rare. They were petitioned for listing as an endangered species but that petition was ultimately denied. But the point is they’re rare and apparently declining, and predation by mountain lions appears to be a pretty significant factor. This prompted some more detailed work that’s going on right now in the Sierras to look at the whole predator complex in the Sierra Nevada and predator relationship to one another. Mountain lions much prefer deer over other prey species. The big question is: Is there enough deer in the Sierras for lions or are deer populations declining or at a low level because of forest management and densification of forests.? Does that have an influence on mountain lions and their behavior towards other predators?These are all questions that are important for us to understand, especially if we are going to address fisher population in its apparent imperiled status. Data we have on fisher is that they like closed forest, they like multi-layered canopy, they need den sites and rest sites distributed across their home range which is quite large. We don’t still understand what a healthy viable landscape should look like when you consider both fisher habitat requirements and other species like spotted owls, how that juxtaposes with resilient forests that have experienced frequent fire and that you’d normally consider to be a heterogeneous landscape that has dense forest and patches of opening which presumably based on everything we know was what forests looked like prior to heavy influence from European people.
There’s so much more great info I can share in future posts from interviews for Ghostwalker that I could not include in the book. Stay tuned.
A few weeks ago our local Wyoming Game & Fish ungulate biologist held a public meeting to discuss the startling decline in our mule deer numbers. We’ve had several hard winters in a row, the worst being 2016-2017, a winter snowpack that locals hadn’t seen in over forty years. That winter was so difficult on our mule deer that as spring emerged, the amount of dead deer across the landscape was phenomenal. I hiked areas where every quarter mile I’d see a dead deer. And so it was a feast for emerging bears. The video below was taken mid-April 2017, just as bears were leaving their dens. This bear is so well-fed he looks like he’s going into hibernation, not coming out of.
Even this winter, although our snowpack was light December and January, February was intensely cold, with few days that cracked zero. The word from Game and Fish is that our herd objective (3 hunt areas) is 4000-6000 but the estimate is 2,900. An adjacent herd (6 hunt areas) objective of 9,600-14,400 is estimated at 6,900. And, according to G&F, the decline began even two years before winter 2016-2017.
Mule deer with fawn
Since I was snowed in and could not attend the public meeting, I spoke directly with the G&F biologist Tony Mong. Hard winters, and especially 2016, was acknowledged to be a major factor in the decline. I also found out that these two herds have never been robust, for reasons scientists have only recently discovered why—long migrations. In the last few years, these deer have been radio-collared as part of the Wyoming Migration Initiative. Researchers found they undertake a very long migration twice yearly into and out of the Park, among the longest in Wyoming mule deer herds. That alone takes its toll. I asked Mong if there had been a study on the low doe/fawn ratio to determine all factors. “Not yet.”
The following week I saw snowmobile tracks behind a locked Forest Service gate (foot traffic is allowed, though not vehicular traffic) that leads to winter elk habitat. I followed the tracks and found Wildlife Services (WS) was laying out bait on a small private inholding that’s surrounded by Forest Service lands. This is high country with windswept meadows, an area that bull elk especially like to frequent during winter months.
Some friends that were shed hunting told me WS was baiting for coyotes, then planned to return and helicopter shoot them. These efforts to kill coyotes in this area will continue on foot through June, although our deer leave the valley late April/early May for their migration. The WS coordinator for Cody told me a dozen coyotes were killed by helicopter last week.
Coyote hunting ground squirrels
Concerned, I again spoke with Mong. He told me G&F usually likes to do controls where deer drop their fawns, but these deer fawn in the Park or in wilderness so they cannot do controls there. This was their best shot, literally. Who was funding this? Not Game and Fish. Private sportsmen organizations, at least one of them from Pennsylvania.
Mong’s explanation made no sense. These coyotes weren’t even the ones living in the fawning areas, so why the effort for little to no return? Even the WS chief told me they might save 20-40 adult deer this year from predation out of the 2,900 in the herd.
Coyote on wolf-killed elk carcass
Coyotes in Wyoming are considered predators and don’t come under the purview of G&F, but under APHIS, Department of Agriculture. That means they are the easiest targets. Next though on the predator list, would be mountain lions and their three year review is coming up this year with the G&F Commission. The zone that encompasses both herds has a consistent yearly quota of 20 lions and is supposed to be a “Source” zone for lions, which means exactly what it says (Source, Sink, and Stable are the three types of management for mountain lion zones in Wyoming). And I have to wonder if what’s next will be hunters crying out for more wolves to be killed in our zone which is a trophy hunt area next to Yellowstone?
Obviously there are a lot of factors that control deer populations, weather and habitat probably being the most significant. As these deer migrate into the Park, surfing the spring green wave, quality of habitat is of special importance. One biologist reminded me how the ’88 fires created lush habitat for deer and elk. Now, thirty years later, young trees have crowded out many of those areas. And massive beetle-kill has created forests of impassible downed timber.
Beetle-killed white bark pines dead on high trail in the valley
Panthera Teton Cougar Project recently published a timely study on this subject. Mark Elbroch and his team looked at how age structure in mountain lions determines food preference. The PTCP found that younger lions tend to specialize on smaller prey and deer. While cats five years and older specialize on elk. His conclusion:
Since younger cats specialize on deer, rather than elk, heavily hunted populations of pumas may put more pressure on deer populations than an un-hunted population with a higher average cat age. (Elbroch’s emphasis)
Another long term study was done in Idaho from 1997-2003 where researchers systematically targeted removal of coyotes and mountain lions in order to grow a mule deer population, one which had similarly low doe/fawn ratio as in my area. The study increased hunting on lions and coyotes, employed WS to kill coyotes winter through spring, targeted coyote killing in fawning areas, and decreased human hunting on deer. In other words, it was very intensive as to predator control along with other factors analyzed. Their results in a nutshell:
Our experimental efforts to change mule deer demography through removal of their 2 top predators had minimal effects, providing no support for the hypothesis that predator removal would increase mule deer populations…Population growth rates did not increase following predator reduction as predicted.
Isn’t it time we applied hard science to agency decisions when it comes to predators instead of bowing to non-scientific, knee-jerk reactions as a public relations ploy for pleasing the hunting community that agencies are “doing something”? Interestingly, I met with our Wildlife Services director to ask about the scope of this project. He acknowledged habitat and weather were actually the foremost critical factors in ungulate population numbers. “But unfortunately, predators are the low-hanging fruit.” His words, not even mine.
Europeans had long since removed their own top predators, and from the beginning of stepping foot on new soil, they carried with them an attitude of removing wolves, bears, and cats in the New World as well. With their arrival, a dark chapter began for the mountain lion, and all large predators, in North America.
As early as the late 1500s, barely a century after the Spanish stepped foot in the Americas, Jesuit priests in California were offering a bull for the killing of a cougar. The first recorded cougar bounty on the East Coast was in 1680 and by 1742 Massachusetts followed suit. In early America, these new inhabitants feared and loathed lions, wolves and bears. Stories were spun that cougars were malevolent, evil, even supernatural beings that killed wantonly. Europeans brought their pigs and cows into the New World under a silent compact that they would flourish. And indeed the domestic animals did thrive, in the marshlands, in the oyster beds of coastal New England, and in the newly cleared forests. Euro-Americans left behind a homeland where African lions had been exterminated centuries before, and wolf extermination began in earnest after the Black Death in the mid-1300s. By 1684 in Scotland, and 1770 in Ireland, wolves were gone, while the rest of European wolves quickly followed. Now the colonists were confronted with a wide new array of predators, and their stance was stanch that extermination without mercy was their God-given right.
Wolves, who traveled in packs, and howled across the countryside, were easily spotted by men who carried with them the folklore and prejudices from the old country. Because of this, they received the most visible and ongoing persecution. Cougars, on the other hand, with their secretive, surreptitious nature, received less attention in lore but were persecuted and eliminated none the less. A story from Jon Coleman’s Vicious illustrates not only the settlers relentless cruelty towards wolves, but also their attitude towards all predators, from the largest to smallest meso-predators such as raccoons and fishers. On the Maine coast in the 1660s, a group hunting for waterfowl along the beach happened upon a wolf. Their dogs, led by a large female mastiff, chased after the wolf up the coastline and pinned it down by the throat.
“The hunters bound the animal’s paws and carried him home swinging ‘like a calf upon a staff between two men.’ That night, they unleashed the predator inside their living room. The beast sank to the floor. No biting, no snarling, he just slouched there, staring at the door. The men tried to rile him up with the dogs, but the pack was listless and uninterested, too worn out to care following that afternoon’s long chase. Their evening’s entertainment ruined, the hunters took the wolf outside and crushed his skull with a log.”
Individuals in early America who took matters into their own hands, enjoyed weaving tales that celebrated their valor, and manhood, while also characterizing the animals they killed as vicious and aggressive to bolster their reputation. As more people arrived with their livestock, individual efforts were soon not enough. Circle or drive hunts soon emerged in eastern frontier towns. These drives killed many more animals in a shorter period of time with less effort. Some of these drives were duly recorded.
In 1753 citizens of three surrounding villages in Massachusetts combined forces to rid the forests of wolves and other predators. In 1810 in Vermont, a large group of men, women, and children used an ever enclosing circle to capture and kill six wolves. Local papers and fliers announced these drives, asking citizens to turn out with the hopes of killing sheep-eating predators. These early hunts laid the groundwork for the ritual of circle hunts throughout New England. The preferred method was a ringleader would send out an invitation to the men living in the surrounding areas. A description of one of these drives included over 400 men, advancing to the center “under the direction of the local militia officers. When the hunters could hear the shouts of their cohorts across the circle, their commanders ordered a halt….the best marksman among them, entered the ring and killed the wolves and foxes trapped there. The farmers scalped the wolves and marched to the town clerk’s office to collect the bounty.” Just as colonists came together for barn raising, and other tasks done as a community effort, the circle hunt became part of the communal tradition: first build the cabin, then clear the woods of predators
A vivid accounting of a circle hunt took place in the woods of Pennsylvania in 1760. Black Jack Schwartz organized two hundred townspeople into a drive so wide it practically encircled the entire county. Men armed with guns, fire, and noisemakers created a circle thirty miles in diameter, slowly driving all the game towards the center, then began shooting indiscriminately for several hours. A few terrified animals escaped the ring, yet the final tally revealed a slaughter of 41 Panthers, 109 wolves, 112 foxes, 114 mountain cats, 17 black bears, 111 buffalo, 98 deer, and more than 500 smaller animals. The animals were skinned, the bison tongues taken, and all the carcasses were heaped in a pile “as tall as the tallest trees” and burned. The stench was so dreadful that settlers vacated their homes for over three miles. Black Jack’s reputation with the Indians of the area, who only killed game as needed for food and clothing, was so unpopular after the drive that he was ambushed and killed while on a hunting trip. The last of these drives was held in 1849 in Pennsylvania.
On the Pacific coast, the Spanish tradition of roping grizzlies and pitting them against bulls for sport is well-documented. These bull-bear fights included betting and even after-church festivities in arenas built specifically for the sport. In California Grizzly Storer and Tevis describe a bear-panther fight near Big Sur that took place after California was admitted to the Union. The gold rush brought in hundreds of thousands of new settlers, and with the arrival of these new residents, grizzlies were being killed in greater and greater numbers. The Spanish bull-bear spectacle continued for a few years until the dearth of bears caused the sport to dwindle. The event in 1865 was described by a young Frank Post who witnessed the event when he was only 6 years, yet never forgot it.
“The lion, which seemed to have no fear, leaped onto the bear’s back and while clinging there and facing forward scratched the grizzly’s eyes and nose with its claws. The bear repeatedly rolled over onto the ground to rid himself of his adversary; but as soon as the bear was upright, the cat would leap onto his back again. This agility finally decided the struggle in favor of the lion.”
The old growth hardwood forests of the East were cleared so quickly that by 1800 residents of the Hudson Valley in New York worried about the scarcity of firewood. By the mid 1800s, from 50% to 90% of the eastern landscape had been cleared for agriculture. Game were so diminished that even by 1639 hunting seasons were closed. Between habitat and food loss, along with human persecution, cougars were effectively eliminated east of the Mississippi River by the mid- to late 1800s. The rugged, arid West and Southwest remained as the only suitable hiding places and cover for mountain lions.
Here’s another excerpt that was cut from the final draft of Ghostwalker.
Comb Ridge rises dramatically in the Utah skyline of desert. A geologic fold, the impressive eighty mile north-south ridgeline rises slowly from the east to a steep, formidable drop-off on its western side. Only a mile wide, the eastern approach contains deep canyons harboring ancient dwellings. These prehistoric homes lie under overhangs, fill canyon recesses, and are stuffed into cliff niches. Then there are the most obtuse communities where no entry can be found, except by rope ladders that long vanished with the desert elements. A hike into these canyon ruins reveals 1000-year-old dried up corn cobs, enormous metates, pottery shards, and walls spattered with clay-red handprints where women once ground corn into meal. Locals tell of an ancient highway that connected Comb Ridge to Chaco Canyon, two hundred miles away. There are stories of footholds etched into the western cliffs, enabling athletic Puebloans to climb the ridge, and complete their journey on the road to the sacred lands beyond.
I spent two months hiking Comb Ridge, and other canyons. One of the largest, Mule Canyon, is a wide valley wash surrounded by sheer sandstone cliffs. Mostly an open, sunny, easy hike, the few ruins are hard-to-spot since they hang far up the canyon walls. I was following a bobcat, his prints easily visible along the sandy canyon bottom.
Bobcat prints in soft sand
He was on a direct route, according to his tracks, probably returning from a nightly hunt. The tracks engrossed me for over a mile, when suddenly they veered off to the right, into a narrow steep ravine. As I changed course to follow them, I looked up, and higher than I could climb, was my bobcat, sitting unperturbed amidst the alcoves of man-made walls and rooms. This large habitation, unoccupied since the 12th century, accessible only by rope or ladder, was now home to this shadowy predator, the perfect apartment for this nimble animal as a safe-house from humans.
The apartments were inaccessible by foot
____________________
Frank C. Hibben, author of the colorful and captivating Hunting American Lions, was given a grant from Southwestern Conservation League to spend a year studying mountain lions. Although Hibben documented prey and collected scat, researching lions in the 1930s mainly meant hanging out with professional lion hunters and going on hunts for control kills. In his book, Hibben tells of riding with his houndsman Giles Goswick, deep into the canyons of Arizona tracking a cattle-killing cougar.
The cougar was a skilled stealth artist, following narrow ledges along gulches with steep overhanging cliffs, perplexing the dogs who kept losing track of the animal. Following their lead dog through a narrow ravine, Hibben and Giles scrambled over centuries old fallen trees and canyon pools, with the barking of dogs echoing down the canyon. As the canyon walls became steeper, the chasm grew dimmer, the mysterious noises along with the din of barking grew louder, the little gulch grew eerier.
The canyon walls grew steeper as the echoing of dogs grew louder
Giles stayed ahead, concentrating on trying to find a lion track in the patches of sand on the canyon floor when suddenly Hibben shouted to him “Look up there—to the left. Up there in that shadow,” pointing and waving his hand. Giles undoubtedly thought Hibben had seen the lion on an overhang, but instead he found, shaded by the overhanging cliff, two caves, one above the other, with fragments of man-made adobe masonry and mortar housing a window cut-out.
“Look up there—to the left. Up there in that shadow,” Hibben shouted.
Even with all the excitement of their lion chase, the dogs still howling in the distance, the men stopped to examine this ancient ruin. They surmounted a low ledge and stood at the lower cave entrance. Fragments of walls and partitions still clung to the cave floor.
They surmounted the wall and stood at the lower cave entrance.
Fingerprints of the long-dead builders were outlined in the mortar where they had pressed it hard between the stones. The usual pack rat occupants were making the cave their home, but perched on top of the rat’s stick and cacti mounds was a yucca sandal with the ties and strings still intact. There was even a visible hole in the heel of the sandal. Yet it was the cave fifty feet above this one that had the startling discovery. Not big enough for human habitation, as their eyes became accustomed to the shadows in this darkened environment, this small arched opening of the cave had sticks protruding outward in all directions. The ‘sticks’ were bound with bands of dark material, rings of blue and yellow color, with feathers on their ends.
Yet it was the cave fifty feet above that had the startling discovery
“Giles! They’re arrows,” Hibben exclaimed, while Giles was already pulling out his lariat rope that he carried around his waist. Deftly, Giles threw his rope, barely reaching the lowermost of the protruding shafts, and three arrows fell at the men’s feet. The arrows were preserved perfectly by the dry climate—wooden arrows fitted with three feathers and a notch for the bow string. Maybe two or three hundred of these arrows protruded from the small opening above.
For a few moments, time stood still
For a few moments, time stood still. The men forgot where they were or why they were there, when suddenly the barking of the dogs brought them back. The cougar that had led them to this place had been forgotten momentarily. Carefully, they placed the arrows and the sandal on a ledge in the lower cave, to remain in situ, and as they looked up, they saw the dogs had treed their victim, who was hanging from a gnarled spruce limb at the end of the canyon.
Hibben ends his story by saying “The long-deserted cliff house in the narrow canyon with the ceremonial arrow cave above it created an atmosphere of antiquity which was not ordinary background for any cougar. Perhaps this lion was the reincarnation of one of the old cliff dwellers prowling yet the tumbled masonry and the dark caves of his forefathers.”
The creation of a book requires a lot of writing, as well as pruning. Sometimes those tossed passages are difficult to let go of. As I prepare to give several talks around the Bay Area, I thought I’d offer a few prime pieces from Ghostwalker that I hated to cut. This one includes a story told to me by a friend who lives in Marin County.
Home range sizes were still perplexing me. In my valley next to Yellowstone Park, deer and elk move elevationally winter and summer, with predators following. Fawns and calves born in the spring are taken advantage of by cougars, as well as bears and wolves. As the seasons progress, although young fawns and calves are too swift for bears, cougars easily prey on them. Also, such small prey can be eaten in one sitting, helping to avoid kleptoparasitism. As the game follows the green-up in the high country, they disperse, making for larger cougar home range sizes.
In the Bay Area, excellent forage and warm weather had deer staying put. Cougars didn’t have to travel. Looking at Rick Hopkins study of the Diablo Range, an average home range for a male was around 60 square miles. The Santa Cruz study was documenting similar male home range sizes. Marin County habitat is a mix of what’s found in the Mt. Hamilton and Santa Cruz Mountains—conifer forest mix, and large swaths of oak/woodlands. I can testify that the deer population is large and healthy, along with feral cats, raccoons, opossums and other small prey. I spent a lot of time as a landscape designer thinking about deer, rodent, and raccoon proof strategies for homeowners.
Researcher Zara McDonald with cougar kitten. McDonald heads up the Bay Area Puma Project
I asked the same question to Bay Area Puma Project biologist Courtney Coons and she approached it from a different angle. “I think it’s quite disturbing. Why is it that just in this little strip [of the South peninsula], where the human population is quite dense, we see a ton of pumas, maybe six or seven? And we’ve had females with kittens in the south peninsula too. While maybe three males, at most, and no females with kittens, in the North Bay. I think that’s something we need to figure out.”
What makes for good habitat? While Marin has some of the best connected pristine habitat in the Bay Area, pumas are just not using it much. Are there too many people biking and hiking as the playground for San Francisco weekend warriors? Or, an alternative idea Courtney has, is that corridors in the south bay are easier to spot, while corridors from Marin to Sonoma are just not easily found. Using Google Earth, Courtney shows me large stretches of ranchlands, land with no cover that cougars would have to cross to disperse. Although young dispersers don’t know where they are headed, they do know the difference between cover and no cover. Coon says “we have two criteria for good lion habitat: deer and cover.”
Unlike Los Angeles, the Bay Area has a lot of potential for lion “meet and greet” corridors. That is what researchers are exploring.
Although researchers are loathed to use undocumented ‘sightings’ as evidence of cougars, over the years there have been many such reports in Marin before camera work was taking place. I lived in Lucas Valley for almost twenty years. The valley corridor (no relation to George Lucas although his Skywalker Ranch is located farther up the valley) and surrounding hillsides are oak woodland habitat. As one travels west up the valley, the fog belt begins and with it the Redwoods and douglas fir forest. Most of the surrounding hills are protected open space, while the more populated basin, a mix of housing developments, single homes, ranches, and state park, feeds all the way to Point Reyes Station and Nicasio, including north to Petaluma. Continuing west to the ocean is the large swath of Point Reyes National Seashore. Central Marin consists of hills and valleys—people live in the valleys while the hills are mostly protected. It’s a nightmare for cell service.
Lucas Valley was named after the rancher that owned these lands. In the 1960s he sold to developers who divvied up the lowlands, while a farsighted group of homeowners raised enough funds to purchase the surrounding hillsides. Once purchased, they gave it to the county Open Space District to manage. A perennial stream, named Miller Creek, runs through the valley. When I lived there, I heard tales of trout runs and arrowheads in the 1950s. When nearby Miller Creek Middle School was being built, a Miwok Indian camp was unearthed along with a large shell midden. The archaeologists put up a chain-link fence to protect it from school kids and pot-diggers. Now it’s a large lump of weedy dirt, waiting for later exploration, sitting beside basketball hoops. When new buildings were going up at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, the crews uncovered Indian burial sites. Obviously, this was a favored valley for thousands of years.
The local elementary school is also adjacent to Miller Creek. During the dry season thirsty deer come to drink and the predators follow. It was at this time of year, during the mid-90s when I lived there, that my neighbors saw cougars. Cougar alerts for the school were commonplace. A neighbor looked out the kitchen window and in the atrium, was a large cougar. The cat entered from the open roof, found what must have looked to him like a hole leading to a sunny cave, so he jumped in. The owner called the district office, who tranquilized and moved the cat. During the time I lived in the valley, I probably heard about five reliable reports from friends who spotted cougars. Possibly many of those sightings were the same cat.
My friend Arjun Khalsa told me a story that took place in 2009. Arjun lives in a typical housing development at the mouth of Lucas Valley. A maze of streets and middle-class single-family homes, many of the houses, including his, abut protected hills of grassland dotted with mature oaks. An avid birder and naturalist, Arjun was walking the hills behind his house on a daily basis with binoculars and a tape recorder, observing multiple generations of white-shouldered kites. On one of these walks, Arjun ran into two women who told him about several long-tailed weasels occupying one of the bluffs. Since the hill was along Arjun’s path, he inspected it more closely, yet saw nothing unusual within and around the thick grasses.
One morning on his walk while looking for the birds, on the hill above is a large cat, staring at Arjun and his dog, Merlin. By comparing the size of the cat to Merlin’s sixty-pound frame, Arjun can tell this cat is at least one and a half the weight of Merlin, and several inches taller. “It’s kind of a charged moment”, Arjun tells me, as “the cat turns around and saunters away from me, exposing very large pads on the bottom of its hind feet, and a big sweeping tail slowly going back and forth, left to right, in a fluid, confidant slow motion that was almost hypnotizing as he walked away.”
Lion in east Bay
Through his binoculars, Arjun watched the big cat head directly for the same hill that the women told him weasels lived on. He followed the cat, staying far behind, yet all the while watching through binoculars, until the cat turns and stares directly at him. At that point Arjun returns home, calls the ranger, describes what he saw and the ranger verifies he saw a lion.
The following day Arjun heads back to the bluff where the cat had disappeared. He’s been there many times before, but today was unique, for the entire hill, all of the soft dirt and grass within a patch of fifteen or twenty feet, was ripped up. And scattered over the area was brown fur, weasel fur. With the grass and the dirt exposed, Arjun could see little tunnels all around. At that moment, says Arjun, “it was absolutely clear to me that this lion had been looking back at me and saying ‘this is my dinner dude, and you are staying away from here.’”
Here is a link to all my presentation in January around the Bay Area. The first of many will be held at the REI in the Marina. Hope to see you at one of my events!
recumbent stone lions surrounded by a wall of stone with east facing door.
There are few examples of cougar rock art throughout the Western states, although more exist in the Southwest. But Bandlier’s Lion Shrine is not really rock art at all, but two recumbent lions carved out of individual pieces of volcanic tuff.
The carvings lie side by side and are close to life sized figures with a crude wall of boulders encircling them. To keep them off the grid of people’s attention, the National Monument doesn’t even refer to the lions on their website.
Local tribes consider The Stone Lions a sacred site. Pilgrimages are made even today by Cochiti and Zunis, who leave offerings around the shrine. Although it’s not known exactly what these unique carvings represent, speculation is this was a hunting shrine for ancient Puebloan peoples.
Not too far from this site, another single lion shrine lies outside the Park, its location on an obscure mesa kept highly secret. Like the Shrine of the two Stone Lions, this is also a recumbent lion surrounded by a stone circle.
Several years ago, the University of New Mexico used a helicopter to remove the lion and deliver it to the Maxwell Museum. Amid loud protests, the carving was returned to its original site, although the tail is now missing.
One of several canyons that needs to be descended and ascended on the 13-mile round trip hike
With finalization of Ghostwalker’s manuscript, I had a strong impulse to make the pilgrimage myself to the carvings. The hike seemed to embody the completion of my journey with the lion’s tale, but also a spiritual celebration of the animal. A final and fitting end to the book’s story.
Walking inside one of the many canyons on the way to the Shrine
I was in SW New Mexico last March for several weeks exploring the Gila, so on my return to Wyoming I traveled to the town of Los Alamos which is near Bandelier.
Since the exact location of the Shrine is not on the Park’s website, I went to their visitor center the day before to inquire as to how to get there. The Park employee told me they no longer reveal anything about the location because the Puebloan peoples do not want others making non-traditional offerings or desecrating the site.
Since I had a rough idea of where to go, I boarded the dog in Los Alamos and took off for the rugged 13-mile hike. In the process, one has to descend through several canyons and no water along the way.
I took several quarts of water and stashed them for the return trip. I’m not a strong hiker, so I considered this a long arduous hike and prepared some minimal items in case I had to stay overnight.
Looking inside from the door
The Shrine sits about a mile from a ruin named Yapashi Pueblo, considered at minimum over 1000 years old. Anyone visiting this site must approach it as you would any ancient temple or church–with respect, honoring, and never take anything from the site.
A wall of large stones set upright ring the carvings with a door facing east. The carvings themselves are so old and weathered that one can barely make out the lions. In fact, I read one account that believes one is a lion and the other might be a jaguar.
At the time of the carvings, both animals lived in the area. Offerings of turquoise chips laid over the carvings are the visible sign of native pilgrimages.
Remains of Yapashi Pueblo
Good view of the remains of the wall enclosure
The visit to the Shrine of the Stone Lions felt like the final chapter of all my efforts in writing Ghostwalker. I spoke with dozens of individuals, conducted over fifty interviews, and read mounds of newspaper clippings and scientific articles.
Yet the hike and visit to the Shrine captured my initial impulse–the respect and love for this magnificent, powerful animal.
Leslie Patten Books: Wild Places, Sacred Spaces 