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.
One-Eye with her kittens during happier times
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.
Here is One-Eye in 2021 when she first arrived here as a young lion. Listen to her caterwauling
I’m very excited that University of Nebraska Bison Books picked up an expanded edition of Ghostwalker to be released Fall 2024. A preview of what’s new:
A new chapter exploring mountain lion management for desert bighorn sheep reintroductions in the southwest US. A highly complex and controversial issue, we look at and compare the approach of three states: New Mexico, Arizona, and California. This issue has never been addressed in depth. Mountain lions are dying unnecessarily through egregious state game agency directives.
What’s with California these days? The California chapter, completely revised, goes in depth on their problems with genetic bottlenecks in Southern California and coastal areas as far north as Santa Cruz. We’ll explore the findings of the Sonoma County study by Quinton Martins, the recent results of CDFW Justin Dellinger’s analysis, and the enormous task of building corridors and passageways for lions to continue to exist.
What’s new in the conservation scene for wildlife? I speak with Kevin Bixby about his new organization Wildlife for All. Panthera’s Veronica Yovovich tells me about their study on non-lethal methods for livestock protections.
New stories and updates throughout the book.
23 new interviews with researchers in addition to the 1st edition interviews
22 new photos
To pre-order and receive a 40% discount, use this link and enter code 6AF24
For those of you who haven’t read the first edition, I did several years of research and interviews with prominent biologists working actively with mountain lion research today. The three studies in Yellowstone National Park, a 16 year study in Grand Teton National Park, revealed the secret lives of mountain lions, their interactions with wolves, bears and other wildlife. A full chapter on California, the only state where mountain lions are fully protected from hunting; a look at mountain lions from the angle of trackers; what houndsmen who have worked with biologists have to say; along with how lions care for their young, how they find each other to mate, what a scrape is and more.
I’ll be posting short clips of many of the interviews I did with researchers in the coming months. First interview will be posted here and on YouTube in a few weeks with Sean Murphy, a biologist who worked for New Mexico Game and Fish. He’ll talk about the indiscriminate and ongoing culling of mountain lions by the department in order to transplant desert bighorns.
To pre-order and receive a 40% discount, use this link and enter code 6AF24
This is an excerpt from the upcoming expanded edition of Ghostwalker: Tracking a Mountain Lion’s Soul through Science and Story. (University of Nebraska Press, Fall 2024 release)
Just days after my arrival in California, a friend sent me a photo from a door camera of a collared lion in her neighborhood. The lion was standing in a driveway in the early morning hours. Only Dr. Quinton Martins who was running a study north of Marin was collaring cats so this lion had to be one of his. The news media quickly blew up, using the same photo as evidence. Reviewing the GPS data, Dr. Martins told the Press the young male lion known as P36 had crossed busy highway 101 five times. When the cougar encountered the crowded business area of southern Marin, he quickly hightailed it back north.
I met with Martins a few days later, curious what he’d discovered about cougars in Sonoma. Both Sonoma and Marin counties are the end of the road for cougars traveling along the North Coast, but Sonoma County has a larger suitable land base for cougars and more linkages north. Sonoma County is considered an agricultural and farming community, although in the last several decades the area has become more gentrified, with small acreage vineyards that serve as tax write-offs, mega-mansions, and commuters to points south. The semi-rural, mixed habitat region also has a ballooning number of hobby ranchers who own a few small animals like goats and sheep.
Martins measures a mountain lion’s tail after a capture
From South Africa, Martins was an experienced safari guide with a particular interest in leopards and lions. He became intrigued with the mountain leopards of the Cape in South Africa and began a 10-year research study which contributed to his PhD, learning more about this elusive mountain cat and inventing innovative ways to trap and collar them. In 2016, Martins introduced a mountain lion project to Audubon Canyon Ranch, a local and established San Francisco North Bay environmental non-profit. The proposal was accepted and called Living with Lions Project.
I ask Martins to describe P36’s journey. Martins shows me a map with P36’s GPS pings on them. It looks like a drawing of a billiard game with dots everywhere, some clustered, others far-flung. P36 hadn’t just arrived south into Marin, but previously roamed through three counties looking for a territory to call his own, at one-point landing in a parking lot by the ocean
P5. A male in Martins study
“Ah, so that’s the Pacific. Always wanted to see that,” Martins jokes. “Then P36 heads down the coast all the way to Point Reyes, ending up overlooking the Golden Gate bridge. Back tracks and pops over to Tiburon. The last GPS reading indicates he’s hightailed it out of Marin and crossed the Russian River heading back north through Sonoma County.”
So far P36 has been lucky, crossing busy highway 101 several times without injury. He explored three counties of suitable habitat, all probably occupied by resident males. Like the findings in Santa Cruz, Martins says these young dispersers seem to use sub-optimal fringe habitat while they move about, staying under the radar of any resident males. Dispersers typically use creeks as corridors, killing small prey like raccoons as they navigate to a permanent territory. Habitat near human dominated areas is rich with small prey that cougars can live on.
Releasing a cougar from Martins capture set
“P36, his diet has been amazing,” Martins tells me. “We recorded him since March last year killing 37 deer, 6 wild boar, 2 badgers, an otter and a squirrel. No livestock. And we’ve had him on properties where there is livestock around like calves and he’s made a deer kill right there. You get a day bed reading where he’s walked back through the livestock area, hangs out there, then goes back to feed on the deer he’s killed.”
Given that the North Coast region is still considered an excellent source of genetic diversity, I was curious about the success of Martins’ male dispersers. P36 was doing well, but what about his other cats. Martins shows me a map of his eastern Sonoma study region where two males have successful territories. Considering the majority of suitable habitat in the area is likely already occupied, dispersing males are going to have to head north into Mendocino or beyond.
“There is clearly connectivity in our landscape, which means that any cat can come down here, or get out of here. The key source areas are really important; then ensuring connectivity in the landscape is the next thing. We’ve got all that (in Sonoma County). We’ve got great source populations up north, from Oregon, Mendocino. But cats coming south get to the end of the road in the North Bay area.”
Coming soon, audio link to listen to Dr. Quinton Martins talk about his unique system of mountain lion capture
The deer population in my zone has crashed over the last several years due to a series of very hard winters. Deer are about at 50% of what they were 4 or 5 years ago. Wyoming Game & Fish completed their mountain lion quota review, done every three years, this past summer. G&F decided to increase the cougar quota in our zone (zone 19) from 20 to 25 lions. Their logic was they’d adjusted the unit’s parameters, creating one unit that hugs along the Absaroka front, instead of two smaller units which went from mountains to desert. G&F figured the mountain area could withstand a higher kill rate, while the desert, zone 20, would be a ginormous year-round kill zone where lions wouldn’t be tolerated.
Lion track
Unsaid at the review spring meeting was the hope killing more lions would increase deer–a logic that has been soundly debunked via scientific research. And although the G&F biologists know this, they also are placating deer hunters who don’t follow the science, but just know lions eat deer.
Apart from the “growing more deer” argument, a deep flaw in raising our quota is this: Zone 19 is considered by G&F a “source” zone. Wyoming uses a management tool for lions called source-sink-stable. It works pretty much how it sounds. Sink is a zone where lions are not tolerated–in areas with more population. Stable just keeps the population as it is, and source is where lions disperse from to fill the rest of the state where they deem appropriate. As a source zone, zone 19 abuts Yellowstone National Park, so it is a logical place for a “Source” population to come from. Yet at our season setting information meeting last spring, when several houndsmen protested they were no longer seeing large males, that they’d been over-hunted, the G&F replied “You’re just not going to see what you used to before 2008.” 2008 was when the G&F cracked down on lions with higher quotas. With that reply, G&F pretty much admitted they were no longer managing zone 19 as a source population, that they’d abandoned their own management constraints.
A snapshot of today’s hunt quotas. Column 1 indicates zone. Column 2 is the quota for that zone. Column 3 is what has been killed so far in that zone. Column 4 are kills not counted towards quota. For instance, zone 26 is closed with a quota of 15 and kills of 17, with 1 not counted towards quota. Zone 20 is shaded because it is open year-round. Otherwise the lion season is Sept. 1-March 31.
Dr. Toni Ruth did a study in Yellowstone’s northern range. One of her findings was that road density outside the park determined quota fulfillment.
Lower elevations and increasing density of roads, particularly in areas open to cougar hunting north of Yellowstone National Park (YNP), increased mortality risks for cougars on the GYNR.
Here is a map from that study. You can see that the drainages east of the Park, where there is easy road access, is where kills are highest:
If G&F were managing for a true “source” population, they would close off road access to vehicles, create walk-in access only, limit areas in zone 19 to photography only, have a zero quota on females, and other rules; not raise the quota. I requested a map from G&F showing where the three years of kills were approximately made in zone 19. I did this before their review of quotas at the commission meeting last July. Predictably all the kills clustered around the main road in my valley and roads elsewhere in the zone.
I’ve been using trail cameras for over ten years in reliable cougar travel corridors. The last two winter seasons it has been obvious our cougar population is down. Where once a dominant male was regularly making scrapes, only bobcats now come. Where I’d always catch females with cubs, I haven’t caught any in several years, nor have I encountered many tracks. With the deer population down, it would follow our lion population would too. Females just wouldn’t be producing cubs or not very many at least.
Today I was thrilled to find a male lion track and follow him. I’d caught him briefly on my camera, but in a very different location than I’d seen before. I also found one of his kills. In addition, I filmed a wounded female last month at a site where in past years males made scrapes, yet there hasn’t scrapes at that site for three years. Here are a few photos. Because of the sensitive nature of these cats, I will not reveal any location data.
Male lion scrape
Lion track in deeper snow
Measuring the metatarsal width can determine sex. 50+mm is reliably a male. I was measuring this one at 55 in several prints
Wounded female at an old scrape site
Here is the male I was following. I’ll be trying to get a better photo of him.
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
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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 Human Footprint 