Big Cats On the Move

By Karl Wolfshohl
Progressive Farmer Contributing Editor

Mountain lions kill and eat Rink Goswick’s cattle. It’s an attribute of the big cat that he does not appreciate. But he does enjoy hunting them on horseback, trailing behind a pack of bawling Bluetick hounds.

Goswick, a 73-year-old rancher and former cattle buyer, lives in Humboldt, Ariz. He runs cattle in the dry, rugged, ponderosa pine–studded mountains and valleys of the Prescott area. His grandfather began ranching in the north-central part of the state in 1918, working cattle at an elevation of 7,000 feet along the Mogollon Rim. Goswick has hunted cougars all his life, following in the footsteps—and hoof prints—of his father and grandfather.

“My granddad was a federal government hunter for quite a few years,” he says. “The Biological Survey [a division of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] still hunts mountain lions here for varmint control. The state has now classified them as big game instead of predators, but if they’re killing your cattle, you can hunt them.”

One of his sons recently lost a calf to a cougar. “What a kill looks like depends on how soon you find it. Lions usually drag their prey and cover it up,” Goswick says.

Agile Predator. The mountain lion is an impressive hunter, able to bring down large animals, such as 200-pound mule deer. They kill by crushing their prey’s esophagus, causing suffocation.

About the height of a German shepherd at the shoulders, they weigh from 70 to 150 pounds and can grow to 8 feet long. An adult cougar can leap 20 feet vertically and 40 feet horizontally in a single jump. Females give birth to two to four kittens per litter.

A century ago, they were dispersed across the U.S. But their numbers declined as habitat and prey disappeared. In the Midwest and East, they were extinct, except in South Florida, where they’ve continued to make a home as the protected Florida panther.

But since the late 1960s, when open-season hunting began to decline, there has been a turnaround in their numbers. Mountain lion populations have been increasing, especially in the West. They are also being found anew in the Midwest and Mid-South.

The conservation group Defenders of Wildlife cites an estimate that 30,000 cats live in the West. Others say there is no good scientific study to back that up.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department believes there are 2,500 to 3,000 mountain lions in the state. In California, wildlife officials believe 4,000 to 6,000 animals range over half the state.

With these numbers, it is not surprising that attacks on domesticated animals, cattle included, have been rising—although the totals are small compared to the number of domestic livestock sharing ground with lions.

Montana recorded 23 lambs and sheep killed by lions in 2006. By 2010, game officials recorded 127. In Montana, however, domestic animals fall far more often to wolves.

Arizona is ground zero for mountain lion attacks. A study of mountain lion activity included 917 confirmed instances of the lions killing cattle between 1976 and 2005. The number of instances has become more frequent in recent years.

Attacks are most common in Arizona from January through June. March is the deadliest month, with an average 100 attacks reported. Researchers suspect a correlation between declining mule deer numbers and an easy opportunity to carve calves out from herds roaming prime cat habitat.

A big target. Ninety percent of attacks on livestock in Arizona (which includes cattle and calves, colts, chickens, domestic goats and sheep, dogs and domesticated exotic animals, such as ostriches) have been on cattle. And 98% of those involved calves. Attacks on sheep can be devastating. Single mountain lions have been found to kill up to 30 sheep in a short period of time.

Hunters themselves may be a factor in the increasing number of mountain lion attacks on cattle.

“There are so many hunters, they put pressure on any kind of game animal,” Goswick says. “Every time it snows in the high mountains, people find tracks and go hunting. It’s hard on the lion population. There are more lions in the lower elevations, where there’s not as much snow and they are harder to hunt.”

Arizona game officials agree. Mountain lions have moved from higher to lower elevations where prey, including livestock, is more abundant.

Mountain lions were classified as a predatory animal by the Arizona territorial legislature in 1919 and carried a $50 bounty. From 1947 to 1969, the state made 5,400 bounty payments.

The lion was reclassified as a big game animal in 1970. The Arizona game department believes that today the state’s population is “robust and growing.” Hunters harvest 250 to 300 animals annually.

Show Me Sign. Harley Shaw is well aware of the cougar’s newly expanding range because of requests to train eastern biologists about cougar sign. (In hunting vernacular, “sign” is used in the singular.)

“We did four workshops related to ongoing sightings that were a little hard to decipher east of the Great Plains, in the Midwest states and farther on,” says Shaw, a biologist who has spent his career working for the state of Arizona, including eight years with mountain lions.

Between 1990 and 2008, there were 172 confirmed sightings of mountain lions in a slice of the central U.S., ranging from the Dakotas, east to Michigan and down to Texas and Louisiana.

As in the West, confirmed sightings have been increasing. South Dakota reported 45 confirmed sightings in 2011 and 16 attacks on domestic animals. Eight of those were confirmed. From 1990 to 2008, the state recorded only 11 sightings.

“Biologists in the East asked if I would do a workshop there on recognizing sign. I said I didn’t know what I would show them,” Shaw says. So, the workshops were held in the West.

“I can go out pretty much any day and find sign,” says Shaw, who now lives in Hillsboro, N.M., along the eastern edge of the Gila National Forest. How are the cougars doing in his area?

“You get mixed messages,” he says. “I think in all, they’re doing OK. The trend is they’re increasing in the West, and we’re seeing liberalized [hunting] regulations. But some old lion hunters tell me it’s getting harder to find a track, so who knows?”

In Nebraska, they know.

For a hundred years, there were no mountain lions in the Cornhusker State. Then one was seen in 1991; and in 2006, a female was documented in the rugged Pine Ridge area of the Nebraska panhandle. The first kitten was found in 2007. State biologists believe 22 cougars now live in the Pine Ridge. Some say the number could be as high as 37.

“People don’t hear about it when a rancher finds a mountain lion in a tree or sees one on a trail camera,” says Nebraska biologist Sam Wilson.

But people “heard” the shot police fired to kill a cat in a Kearney, Neb., neighborhood in May 2011. Wildlife officers believed it was just passing through on its way eastward, out of the Pine Ridge. “When one is found in somebody’s backyard in town, you hear about it, and we can’t take chances,” Wilson says.

Scat, Cat or Cat Scat. A special “scat detector” dog named Train has helped Wilson locate cougar sign along the Pine Ridge. Train, a Chesapeake Bay retriever, has the rare ability to go on the alert when he sniffs cougar scat, and only cougar scat.

“It surely comes as no surprise to any dog owner that they excel at finding poop,” Wilson wrote in a Nebraska Wildlife Conservation Fund newsletter. “But it certainly was exciting to see this talent put to its finest possible use in helping unravel the mystery of this new population.”

Wilson says the dog occasionally picks up on bobcat or coyote scat by mistake, “or he tricks us because he is bored and wants his reward.”

Why are the big cats spreading? Biologists say it’s only natural because they are legally protected in most areas. Also, deer and other native species hunted by mountain lions are newly abundant in areas where that was not true even a decade or two ago.

Humans are marginally more at risk.

“They’ve killed people, but the odds of being struck by lightning are extraordinarily higher,” Wilson says. He advises people who come in contact with a cougar to stand their ground and not act afraid. “Running might trigger their predatory instinct,” he says. “Hold your coat up to make yourself appear bigger. Pick up your kids so they don’t become frightened and run.”

The Cougar Network. “Cougars are doing pretty well today within their home range,” says Ken Miller, a retired electrical engineer and high-tech entrepreneur who lives in Concord, Mass. Miller and two friends started the Cougar Network (www.cougarnet.org) with a particular interest in studying the spread of this predator.

In their western home range, “Texas and California are the only states that don’t [classify] them as game animals,” Miller says.

“In Texas, you can kill them anytime. In California, they are fully protected and there’s no hunting for them there.” Nuisance lions can be removed in California. The state offers that small children should not be left unattended within mountain lion habitat.

Long Ranger. Males are highly competitive for territory and will wander a long way in search of it.

Before meeting its untimely end on a Connecticut parkway in June 2011, a young male cougar probably traveled 2,000 miles or more from its original home in South Dakota, blazing a trail through at least six states and Canada.

When the road kill was found, game biologists originally thought it was a captive lion that had escaped.

“But the animal looked wild,” Miller says. “There were quills in its skin, so it must have preyed on a porcupine. It was healthy and weighed 140 pounds. A lab in Montana analyzed its DNA and confirmed that the cat originated in the Black Hills.”

The big cat probably moved out of South Dakota and followed river corridors to Minnesota, then traveled through Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, then into Canada and down through New York and finally Connecticut, looking for a home. DNA analysis of its scat and tufts of hair left along the way confirmed its trail in most of these states.

Looking for home. “A dominant, mature male has a territory,” Miller says. “When it’s time for a young male to leave its mother, it has to get out of there or the dominant male will kill it.” He says recent sightings in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois and Louisiana have been young males, sometimes following river corridors through plains and farmland to areas with cover, hundreds of miles away as they look for new territory. “They need to find suitable food and a female,” he says. Young females don’t generally wander so far because the alpha male tolerates them.

“For the most part, they go adjacent to their mother’s territory or not far from it,” Miller says.

Some biologists believe it’s counterintuitive to kill a dominant male that may know better than to bother livestock. Killing the alpha male may allow juveniles to get into trouble killing domestic animals, Miller says.

Hunting also isn’t a good, long-term population control, the Arizona study found.

“I don’t think the answer is to kill every lion,” says Goswick, the Arizona rancher. “If there’s a good deer population, they don’t eat so many calves.”

Encounter With a Lion

There are no proven actions to minimize an attack if you meet a lion, but the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department offers these suggestions:

• If you are in a park or other area where lions are known to be present, don’t hike alone. Keep small children within sight.

• Do not approach a lion, especially one that is feeding or has cubs. Leave the lion an avenue of escape.

• Stay calm. Talk calmly and move slowly.

• Stop and back away slowly. Do not run or turn your back.

• Do all you can to appear larger. Pick up children to prevent them from running and triggering an attack.

• If the lion is aggressive, throw rocks, sticks or whatever you can get your hands on easily. Wave your arms, brandish a stick, speak firmly and loudly.

(BAS)

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