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Cougar - Puma concolor
Topic Started: Jan 7 2012, 08:46 PM (39,620 Views)
Taipan
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Cougar is culprit in horse's death

When a man found his 1,200-pound Arabian horse dead in a Jackson County field last week, he thought it had been shot. There were two punctures in its neck like a vampire bite and gashes that looked like knife wounds. County animal control officer Machele Dunlap showed up and did a careful examination of the horse. No bullets were inside it, and she realized that only one wild animal in Michigan could have done that kind of damage. "It was a cougar," Dunlap said of the wild cat that weighs 100-200 pounds and is also called a mountain lion or puma. "We've had a number of people call in to report cougar sightings, and I have to admit that we were skeptical, because whenever we'd go out to investigate, we couldn't find anything. But there's really no question on this one." Pat Rusz, the research biologist for the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy in Bath, said a necropsy on the horse and a clear track proved it was killed by a cougar.
http://thewesterner.blogspot.com/archives/2005_09_04_thewesterner_archive.html

INVESTIGATION OF A HORSE ATTACK IN WESTERN JACKSON COUNTY, MICHIGAN
Dr. Patrick J. Rusz
Director of Wildlife Programs
Michigan Wildlife Conservancy
September 6, 2005

On September 2, 2005 I inspected a 26-year old Arabian horse found dead by its owner on the morning of August 31. The location was a residence and horse ranch in western Jackson County; the precise location is on file but is being withheld from this report at the horse owner’s request. The horse owner stated his neighbors reported they heard his horses whinnying at about 1:30 a.m. His dog, kept indoors, also began barking at that time. He found the dead horse on flat ground within dense shrub cover at the edge of his pasture. The horse owner saw a long trail of blood on the dead animal’s neck and soon after called 911, which contacted the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department and Parma Township police, reporting that he suspected his horse’s throat had been slashed.

Jackson County Animal Control Officers Machelle Dunlap and Mark Abbott received the call at 8:31 a.m. and arrived at the scene at approximately 10:00 a.m. (August 31). After determining that the horse’s wounds were not knife cuts or bullet wounds, they performed a more detailed investigation in the presence of the horse owner and Parma Township Supervisor Wendy Chamberlain, who had been contacted by the Parma Township police.

The ACOs took color photographs of puncture marks and various measurements. These are noted later in this report. They thoroughly inspected the animal, and skinned back a section of the neck to determine the depths of the more obvious punctures. They also searched the ground where the dead horse was found. They finished their inspection around 3:00 p.m., and the animal was buried that evening in uplands about 250 feet from where it was found.

I visited the scene at 9:00 a.m. on September 2. I was met by ACO Dunlap, Ms. Chamberlain, the horse owner, and a backhoe operator. After reviewing the photographs and measurements taken on August 31 by the ACOs, I (with the help of the backhoe operator) uncovered the horse carcass, which was under about 5 feet of dirt. The carcass was not badly decayed; undried blood was still evident and the neck and head could be easily moved to allow careful inspection. I identified each puncture mark noted and/or photographed by the ACOs. In addition, I found two punctures the ACOs had not seen in the tongue, and two more in the lower neck/throat area. I took photographs during my inspection as did ACO Dunlap.

A total of 8 sets of puncture wounds were noted. The puncture wounds corresponding to the upper canines of the predator were approximately 49 mm (2 inches) apart; the marks of the lower canines were 39 mm (1 ½ inches) apart. Two were found at the upper (back) of the neck just behind the base of the skull. Considerable hemorrhaging was evident there. The puncture holes extended downward 50-60 mm to the depth of the neck vertebrae and spinal cord. The horse was also bitten at the base of the left ear, penetrating part of the skull. There were three claw marks within 100 mm of the wound. Two prominent puncture wounds were also found on the left side of the horse’s neck. Two puncture marks (39 mm apart) were found lower on the throat; they appeared to penetrate less than 30 mm. I assumed these to be from the lower canines.

Two puncture marks were also found in the horse’s tongue. One was almost exactly near the mid-line and although very evident, only penetrated about 15 mm (1/2 inch). The other was on the edge of the tongue. No other puncture or scratch marks associated with the predator’s attack were found anywhere on the horse. No significant part of the carcass was consumed. However, ACO Dunlap and Ms. Chamberlain noted that on August 31 some of the blood on the horse was matted and appeared to them to have been licked.

Following my inspection of the carcass, I examined the spot where the horse was found dead. There was no evidence the horse had been dragged to the spot; rather it appeared to have been killed within an area less than 20 feet in diameter. About 6 square feet of ground was covered with dried blood several mm thick. Three track prints consistent with cougar were found within 15 feet of the blood. Each measured about 3.75 inches in length and width. They were found where the hard-packed ground had been disturbed by horses. ACO Dunlap, Ms. Chamberlain and the horse owner stated emphatically that the cougar tracks were too visible to not have been seen on August 31. Therefore, it seemed that the cougar had returned to the kill scene sometime between the afternoon of August 31 and the morning of September 2.

I then visited the scene of a reported cougar sighting by Ms. Chamberlain. She was traveling north on a road about 1 ¼ miles from the kill site at 10:30 a.m. on September 1, and reported seeing a cougar she estimated was about 6 feet long slowly cross the road less than 35 feet from her car. She had returned to the sighting area later that morning with ACO Dunlap, a State Police officer, and another woman. They reported finding three prints where the animal had walked into a cornfield. I was led to the tracks, but could see only one consistent with cougar in size and shape. Details of the print were not evident. The other two prints had been accidentally stepped on before I arrived at the scene, so I could not examine them.

Based on my observations and measurements, I conclude that the horse was indeed killed by a cougar. No other explanation is plausible. The locations size and pattern of the bite marks were consistent with that of a large adult cougar in every detail. The only other Michigan predator capable of killing a large, healthy, adult horse is a big black bear. The bite pattern and lack of claw marks on the sides and back were inconsistent with bear, a species seldom seen in Jackson County in the last 100 years. Additional evidence -- the tracks found and reported sightings by Ms. Chamberlain and others -- points to a cougar attack.

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http://www.miwildlife.org/news-detail.asp?id=12
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[quoter=Taipan]

"Look who's stalking: a new cougar killer

Another cub is killed. Was it the usual suspect or a newcomer?

By Amanda Covarrubias, Times Staff Writer

November 25, 2006

On Sept. 25, when the radio tracking collar of a young male mountain lion in the Santa Monica Mountains emitted a "mortality signal," indicating it had not moved for at least eight hours, biologists feared the worst.

The 2-year-old puma, one of only three known mountain lions left in the coastal range, was either seriously wounded or dead.

Wildlife ecologist Seth Riley went to investigate, pinpointing the puma's location from its collar and then heading out to the scrubby hills west of Topanga Canyon. There, he found the lifeless cat, its forelegs chewed and its head bearing several puncture wounds.

It appeared that P1 had struck again.

P1, short for Puma 1, is the dominant male mountain lion in the Santa Monica Mountains and the father of the dead cougar.

Riley and the other National Park Service scientists who track the region's mountain lions (also known as cougars or pumas) had been joyous in 2004 when P1 mated with the only other big cat researchers knew to live in the Santa Monicas. Later that year, she bore four kittens.

But since then, for reasons that remain unclear, P1 has gone on the attack, killing his mate and one of their offspring in 2005 and another cub in June. Now a third cub was dead, and P1 was the logical suspect.

When Riley returned to the ranger station to review the global positioning system data from P1's collar, he was surprised at what he found.

GPS data showed that at the time the latest cub was killed, P1 was at least 35 miles from Topanga Canyon, roaming an area far to the west near Point Mugu. And that opened the door to an interesting possibility: Perhaps there was another cougar in the range.

Genetic tests of swabs taken from the dead lion's claws confirmed that he had fought an adult mountain lion other than P1.

For Riley and his colleagues at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, it was the latest twist in what has been an emotional saga.

For five years, they had tracked the mountain lions' movements, hoping their research would help them and the public better understand how this resilient species adapts and survives in urban parkland.

Now, the idea of another adult male, one that had never been tagged by scientists and whose whereabouts were unknown, had added another layer of mystery to the tale.

"We have always said, just because these are the lions we know about these aren't necessarily the only lions," Riley said. "Another lion could move in, or there's lions out there we just don't know about."



A solitary species

Riley and his colleagues at the largest urban national park in the U.S. began monitoring cougars in 2002, when they received state funding to launch the Mountain Lion Project. The scientific study was designed to allow researchers to learn more about the habits of cougars in the 154,000-acre park.

When they started the project, scientists had only a rough idea of how many pumas lived in the mountain range. Solitary by nature, the buff-colored cats generally avoid people. Bobcats, which look similar but are smaller, with tufts of hair sprouting from their ears, are much more prevalent.

To find the mountain lions at the beginning of the project, biologists looked for signs of the cats, then set up remote-controlled cameras in the hills and canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains and in the nearby Simi Hills.

Using the information they gathered, researchers were able to capture all four of the pumas caught on camera and fit them with collars containing radio transmitters.

The lions dubbed P1 and P2 roamed a huge territory in the Santa Monica Mountains south of the 101 Freeway.

The other two, P3 and P4, lived in the Simi Hills north of the 101.

When P2 gave birth in 2004, the biologists were understandably excited. The known cougar population had climbed to eight, although only six lived in the Santa Monicas.

But at the time, scientists quietly worried that the fragmented mountain range would not be large enough to support so many of the large cats, especially as freeways, business parks and houses steadily encroached on open space.

Male mountain lions, weighing up to 200 pounds, need about 150 square miles of "home range" to survive, and the smaller females about 40. Although male and female territories may overlap, males must stake out their own turf in which to roam and hunt prey, or eventually they will fall victim to the prevailing male.

In August 2005, scientists received the news they had been dreading: P1's radio collar showed him near a wooded area north of Mulholland Highway between Kanan and Las Virgenes roads. That put him in the exact area where P2 and her cubs were living.

Rangers believe P1 approached P2 as she was feasting on a freshly killed mule deer and that all or some of the pair's yearling cubs were nearby.

The two big cats brawled fiercely for several hours in the forested area. At the time, park biologist Jeff Sikich was close enough to hear the growls and howls.


But he could not see the pair and was uncertain if they were breeding or fighting. The park's policy is not to interfere, so he did not approach the lions.

The next day, researchers in the office heard the radio transmitter around the female lion's neck giving off the mortality signal, a fast beeping sound that indicates a lack of activity.

Biologists waited a day to give P1 time to clear out, then hiked in to collect P2's body. It was covered with wounds from the struggle.

"It's not surprising when males run into females with kittens, the female will often try to protect them, and the male will try to kill the young males," Riley said.

"We're thinking maybe she was trying to defend those kittens, and that's how she got in the fight."

Earlier that year, P3 and P4 had died after eating coyotes that had ingested rat poison. Now there were only four known mountain lions left in the study area.

In June, P1 struck again, killing one of his female offspring, P7, who was found with puncture wounds in her skull. Through genetic testing, scientists determined that P1 was the culprit.

Riley and his colleagues are not sure why P1 killed P7 but speculate that she may have been guarding a kill that P1 coveted.

Last fall, biologists noticed that the two male cubs, P5 and P8, had moved to the farthest reaches of P1's territory, one on the east end, the other on the west.

"P5 and P8 were looking for somewhere to go," Riley said. "They were trying to stay clear of P1."

Perhaps, eventually, they would have crossed over the 101 Freeway into the Simi Hills and farther beyond into the Santa Susana Mountains or Angeles National Forest.

"If lions are to survive in the Santa Monicas, it's critical for them occasionally to get from north to south," Riley said. "That's where the new genetic material is."

But neither of the cubs made it to a new range. On Sept. 8, P5 was found dead on the western edge of the range near Point Mugu. Veterinary pathologists confirmed that he had died in a fight, and park service biologists were able to download information from their radio collars showing that P5 and P1 were in the same area in the days leading up to the fatal confrontation.

"It looks like they had run into each other, and P1 had chased him," Riley said.

Eighteen days later, P8 was killed by the previously unknown puma just west of Topanga Canyon.



Insufficient habitat

Biologists are still puzzling over what the presence of an unknown cougar tells them. They doubt there are many more lurking in the coastal wilderness because the habitat is not large enough to sustain them.

Still, surveying cougars is an imperfect science. Researchers learn of them through sightings by hikers and campers and by the carcasses left behind when a lion kills a deer for food. A few years ago, an unknown cat turned up dead after being struck by a car near Pepperdine University.

Riley said they will try to incorporate the new puma into their study if they can find it, but he is keenly aware that it could have been injured in its fight with P8 and perhaps even died. Researchers would love to know whether it was a new arrival, a temporary visitor or a longtime resident.

"If we see evidence that the lion is out there, we're interested to see what it's up to," Riley said. "We'll spend time walking trails, streams, ridges, looking for tracks and things. We may even put out remote cameras to get photos."

But Riley said further research is contingent on attracting new funding. The budget for the Mountain Lion Project, which was cobbled together with private donations and a grant from the state of California, is scheduled to run out at the end of the year. Riley and his colleagues are now attempting to raise money to continue their work.

In the meantime, the researchers continue to traverse the craggy hilltops and steep cliffs of the Santa Monica Mountains in search of clues to mountain lion behavior.

On a recent morning, Riley bushwhacked his way through deep underbrush in Nicholas Flat near Malibu hoping to find evidence of a kill made by P6, a 2-year-old female and the sole remaining offspring of P1 and P2.

Data downloaded from P6's collar had shown that the cougar had recently stayed in the same location for more than 24 hours, or about the amount of time it would take to kill and consume a deer.

Crawling on hands and knees, spiny branches tugging at his backpack, Riley finally spotted the lower portion of a fawn's leg on the ground, its black hoof still intact. A few yards away lay a small pelvis bone. He picked up the body parts, looked at them closely, then dropped them back on the ground.

A good hour later, the area thoroughly canvassed, Riley moved on to another spot where P6's collar showed she had recently spent a day and a half. As Riley moved over the terrain, branches and twigs breaking under his weight, all he uncovered were a few samples of dried puma scat that he collected in his backpack. Later, he would wash and inspect the fecal matter to determine what P6 had eaten.

Although no signs of the mystery cat turned up, wildlife biologists are hopeful. They look forward to the rainy season, when paw prints are easier to detect than when the earth is hard and dry.

"This just highlights that the Santa Monica Mountains and the open space in Los Angeles and Ventura County areas are true wilderness areas in many respects," said Rorie Skei, president of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a group that works to buy and preserve undeveloped land.

"And the fact that there does seem to be a heretofore unidentified lion is a very good sign. It signifies that the ecosystem is still healthy."

http://ktla.trb.com/news/la-me-pumas25nov25,0,1834655.story?coll=ktla-news-1

So this poor cougar family not only has to put up with "P1" trying to kill them, it seems a new unidentified cougar has moved into the area and is doing the same thing.

As I said "P1" v the New Unidentified Cougar, should be a great battle! I've been following this saga on & off for a while now. If I find out the result, I'll let you know.


P1 wearing radio collar
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Looks like P1s meet his match!

The lions of Los Angeles
By Dana Bartholomew, Staff Writer
Updated: 03/20/2009 10:50:39 PM PDT

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This is a close up of Lion P10.

THOUSAND OAKS — He was king of the Santa Monica Mountains, the baddest cat around Malibu.

But the 11-year-old mountain lion known to ecologists as P-1 — as in puma one — may have met his end this week in a treetop scrap with a smaller, younger cat.

The irony: Last month, the suspected challenger was the first mountain lion ever monitored crossing the 101 Freeway — evidence local mountain lions are getting a better chance of survival by mixing with other large cat populations.

To better track their ability to cross the freeway, the National Park Service and Caltrans will install 20 video cameras this month at potential lion crossings from Thousand Oaks to Woodland Hills.

"It's really important, because we feel if the mountain lions are going to survive in the Santa Monica Mountains, they need to have occasional animals come (in) from the north, both for genetic reasons and to replenish the population," said Seth Riley, wildlife ecologist for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, the largest urban national park.

"The 101 is the barrier. If we are going to conserve mountain lions in this area, they're going to have to cross the freeway."

Biologists believe there are between five and 10 lions roaming the 153,000-acre mountain park between the Simi Hills and the Pacific Palisades.

Since 2002, National Park Service officials have monitored a dozen of the big cats with radio collars and GPS tracking devices.

On Monday, ranch hands in Hidden Valley south of Thousand Oaks reported a bloody radio collar. In the tree overhead there were tufts of mountain lion hair. On the ground there was blood. And P-1's collar.

But no lion.

For 11 years, P-1 had been the alpha male of the high chaparral, ranging hundreds of square miles from Point Mugu to Topanga State Park above Tarzana.

Weighing in at between 140 and 150 pounds, he was the largest cat ever caught by the National Park Service in Thousand Oaks.

He was also known to have killed three other lions, including two offspring, among them a female with whom he'd mated.

But whether he's still king is the question, as park officials complete a forensic examination of the remains.

"We believe he was in a big fight, and may not have made it," said Riley, an assistant professor at UCLA. "But then again, he could still be alive."

Park biologists had been recently monitoring four male lions, including the pugnacious P-1.

There's P-10, a 100-pound, 2-year-old lion that ranged from Cal State Channel Islands in Camarillo to the Pacific Palisades, where he was once trapped napping between two homes.

Posted Image
This mountain lion P-12, the one that crossed the 101 Freeway at Liberty Canyon Road on Feb. 24, 2009.

This week, P-10 was tracked near the J. Paul Getty Center. On Friday, park biologists were trying to trap him in Topanga State Park to fix a defunct global positioning system signal.

There was P-11, a young male whose tracking collar died recently in the western Santa Monicas.

And there was P-12, first monitored in December, who created a park service sensation when he crossed the 101 Freeway at Liberty Canyon Road at 1 a.m. Feb. 24, venturing from the Simi Hills to the Santa Monica Mountains. It's not clear whether he skedaddled across the freeway or slunk beneath the underpass.

Now living near Zuma Beach, P-12 could possibly have taken down P-1, Riley said, making him the new lion king.

"We'll see," he said cautiously. "He could be P-12 ... a little bigger at 120 pounds. We'll see."

Mountain lions generally kill one large animal per week, mostly deer. While adult males generally range about 250 square miles, Riley said, females range much less. The animals mate year round.

Last year, Congress authorized a study to expand the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area to ensure more wildlife corridors. Conservationists believed linked habitats are crucial to healthy animal populations.

"It's very exciting," said Ron Sundergill, regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, who this week inspected the lion crossing site.

"What we want to do is make sure there are wildlife corridors. That's one corridor between the (Santa Monica Mountains) park and the larger Rim of the Valley - a 600,000-acre section that could potentially be the boundaries for the new national park."

Naturalist Dan Cooper said cats aren't the only animals on the move.

"Even things that we thought were barriers are not," he said, adding he just learned of a bear being spotted at Stone Canyon Reservoir in Beverly Hills. "How do you get a bear across the 405 (Freeway)?"

http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_11963981
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Learning to Live With Mountain Lions

By Maurice G. Hornocker

Something was watching me. I stopped. Not a leaf moved, not a bird called. Then, less than a hundred feet away in the aspens, I saw him. Just his face, eyes like amber, whiskers bristling in the late afternoon sun.

Felis concolor, cat of one color, the ghost of North America. Also known as cougar, panther, puma, painter, catamount, or, most commonly, the mountain lion. It was 1965. I was just beginning my life's work of trying to understand these secretive and elusive cats. That effort had not been going well.

A few years earlier, after five years of grizzly bear research with wildlife biologist John Craighead and his brother, Frank, I had sought a project of my own. John encouraged me to tackle something tough.

Mountain lions seemed not only challenging but also romantic. Once they prowled the entire continent. But after centuries of ruthless extermination, they had been confined to a few wild spots.

In the early 1960s mountain lions were still considered vermin. Farmers, ranchers, and hunters were trying to rid the world of these great cats. And we knew almost nothing about them....

Most mountain lions live in rugged high country. They are best tracked in snow. That meant living in tents in winter, tracking with dogs in often intense cold, then treeing, tranquilizing, and marking. But I was optimistic. By capturing and recapturing, and each time making painstaking observations, I hoped to build a fund of information about these mysterious animals.

I began in January 1963, marking 14 lions within a hundred miles of Missoula, Montana. But by spring most of those 14 had been shot by hunters. So I moved next season as far from civilization as I could get in the lower 48 states, to the Idaho Primitive Area, a roadless wilderness in the Salmon River country.

I hired Wilbur Wiles, the best professional cougar tracker in Idaho. Still, that first winter we couldn't find enough lions for a valid study. I was beginning to think maybe my colleagues were right. A meaningful study of mountain lions might be impossible. I decided to expand the study area, and in the summer of 1965 I backpacked into the wilderness to scout new terrain.

At the mouth of a small canyon, I noticed a series of fresh scrapes—piles of leaves, soil, and twigs that male lions scratch together to mark their territory. I forced my way through the underbrush up the narrow canyon and suddenly broke into a beautiful mountain meadow ringed by aspen groves. It was then that I felt those eyes.

I don't know how long we stared at each other. I was transfixed, mesmerized by the moment. Every other lion I had seen had been treed, snarling at the dogs below, or helplessly drugged by the tranquilizers we use to safely tag them. Eventually, this lion broke our gaze, turned his head slowly, and with majestic grace leaped into full view. Then he was gone.

I can still see his eyes. I've often thought he was a good omen. He was indeed a turning point: The next winter's work went extremely well.

For ten years our team covered thousands of miles in Idaho tracking lions. Our findings, the first scientific documentation of how a mountain lion population lives, laid to rest two of the myths long used to justify eradicating the big cats.

First, we proved that mountain lions will never overrun the countryside. These animals are very territorial and limit their own numbers. The size of a mountain lion's territory is determined by the food supply. Only so many cats can live in a given area.

Second, our research debunked the idea that lions are a danger to big-game herds. Lions kill deer and elk routinely, but most of their prey are very young or very old, not of breeding age. In fact, during our study, deer and elk populations actually increased, while the number of lions remained stable. Food supply, hunting, and weather, we discovered, determine deer and elk numbers.

Today every state with lions except Texas regulates the killing of the animal. Consequently, lions have made an amazing comeback, repopulating former habitats in the West and sometimes startling humans who have moved into those areas.

Mountain lions are indeed back. The question is: Can we make room for them? That means understanding them still better so we can develop appropriate management programs. It also means understanding the often emotional issues of the people who will live with them.

“Lord of stealthy murder, facing his doom with a heart both craven and cruel.” So wrote Theodore Roosevelt about mountain lions at the beginning of this century. His attitude was the prevalent one among European settlers of North America, who saw the lion as a competitor for deer and other game and as a danger to their livestock. Bounties were paid for panther skins. Courthouse records from Centre County, Pennsylvania, show that one local hunter killed 64 lions between 1820 and 1845. During those 25 years an estimated 600 cats were killed in that county alone.

Indiscriminate killing of wildlife, along with massive habitat destruction, wiped out lions in the East outside Florida. Deer too were decimated. Pennsylvania, for example, was forced to import 50 white-tailed deer from Michigan in 1906 to repopulate the forests. Ironically, Pennsylvania, like much of the East, is now overrun with deer, but no one has documented the presence of their top predator, the panther, since the turn of the century.

Finding lions was much less difficult in New Mexico in 1984, when the Department of Game and Fish invited me to conduct a ten-year research project on the cats.

I hired an experienced husband-and-wife biologist team, Ken Logan and Linda Sweanor, to lead the study. We selected the San Andres Mountains, an 80-mile-long range in the Chihuahuan Desert, for our mountain lion laboratory. Isolated on the edge of the White Sands Missile Range, these mountains have been protected from outside influences for the past 47 years.

We spent the first five years, from 1985 to 1990, studying basic lion ecology in the 750-square-mile area. Then, after determining the population dynamics were stable, we decided to simulate a catastrophe by relocating 13 of the 20 resident lions in one-third of the study area to another part of the state. The lions in the other sections were left undisturbed.

The purpose is twofold. First, we want to document the rebuilding of the remaining lion population. How long will it take? How will behavior be affected? Where will the new lions come from? Just as important, we need to know how the transplanted lions react to their new location. This will help us determine how feasible it is to relocate problem lions rather than kill them.

Second, we want to document how the removal of such a major predator from the San Andres ecosystem affects the cougar's main prey, the resident mule deer.

Unlike my early days in Idaho, we now have the benefit of sophisticated radio-tracking devices. We can capture an animal using harmless foot snares, radio collar it, and then track its movements remotely until the battery needs replacing—in about two years. Since 1985, working with veteran trapper Frank Smith, we have marked 148 animals. We found that the study area supports only 30 adult resident lions at any one time. The others have died or grown up and moved on.

We need to keep in touch with each animal at least once a week, and frequently more often. Because the study area is so huge, we travel the back roads with four-wheel-drive vehicles equipped with radio receivers and fly the territory in a plane with an antenna on each wing. We can pick up an individual's transmitter from as far as 60 miles away. Locations are recorded on a contour map, to be analyzed later with a computer.

We have made thousands of radiotelemetry observations. For instance, we can tell when a male and female are mating. Lions are solitary animals, and there's no other reason for two to get together for several days. We therefore know the fathers of most kittens—and even when they were conceived. We've also learned that at any one time there are 15 to 30 dependent kittens in the study area.

We can observe not only birth but also death—often from fighting. Our radio collars emit a different, mortality signal when lions remain motionless for six hours. Thus, when two males come together, we assume they are fighting. When one is killed, the mortality signal comes on, and we know which did the killing.

We've never actually witnessed a fight, but, because the winner usually lays up to recuperate for a few days afterward, we have often captured the victor. Our most infamous fighter was number 22, a big male I nicknamed Atilla because of his extreme aggression. We would locate him near a resident female, and the next day her mortality signal would go off. During our study he killed three females. Some of the victims' skulls had been crushed and had tooth-puncture wounds.

Eventually, Atilla met his match. He was killed by another big resident male within that lion's territory. When we examined Atilla's skull, we found he had been severely injured early in life. Had that head injury affected his behavior?

Aggression, we discovered, is a major difference between the lions of New Mexico and those of Idaho. In Idaho both males and females lived peaceably, seldom fighting. In the San Andres, fighting—often to the death—is common. San Andres males also kill females and kittens.

Why the difference? In the desert, food is limited, and natural selection may favor a more aggressive cat. In Idaho, where food is abundant, aggression is not as necessary.

The two populations also differ in birthing dates and weaning ages of kittens. In New Mexico, kittens are born year-round and are usually on their own by the time they reach 14 months. In Idaho, most kittens are born in spring and stay with their mothers for 18 to 20 months. We speculate that in the relatively peaceful Idaho environment kittens benefit from a longer period of learning from their mothers. They must learn to kill elk, which requires great skill.

In 1990 we began simulating the catastrophe in the San Andres. With cooperation from ranchers in northern New Mexico we had relocated 13 lions, 11 adults and two subadults, by June 1991. What would happen when we released a sizable number of socially related lions into another area? Would they settle down?

One young male, number 88, headed south, roaming widely, then disappeared. Four months later, while making her weekly tracking flight over the San Andres Mountains, Linda heard an unexpected signal—from number 88. Somehow he had found his way home across a distance of 300 air miles.

We continue to monitor the transplanted cats. Four of them have settled in, including one female that bred right away with a local lion and gave birth to five kittens. Two transplants were killed by resident males, and two others died from injuries sustained from hunting mule deer or elk. The rest are wandering.

We have learned that reestablishing a big carnivore in a new area is not easy; several releases are probably necessary. Unquestionably there will one day be attempts to reintroduce mountain lions into parts of the East. Our studies will help them succeed.

Few places on earth have been so blessed with carnivore diversity as Yellowstone. When the park was established in 1872, it hosted not only mountain lions and grizzlies but also wolves and coyotes. When I worked with the Craigheads, however, the mountain lion had virtually disappeared. In the early 1900s it was federal policy to kill large predators to protect game in the park.

By the 1970s lions had returned in numbers to the Yellowstone area just north of the park. I was determined to find out if they were back in the park itself.

In January 1986, with the blessing of park officials, my longtime associate Gary Koehler set out for the backcountry on skis and snowshoes and soon found tracks of three or more individuals. Skiing around a rocky outcrop, he came across a fresh elk carcass. He realized a lion was probably nearby, so he barked like a dog to spook the animal, which then bounded up a tree. Gary often used this trick to get a closer look at a lion.

I had many questions about these new lions in Yellowstone. How were they affecting the abundant elk population? How would that abundance affect the cougars? Would there be more mountain lions? Would their territories be smaller? Would their litter sizes increase?

With support from the National Geographic Society, the National Wildlife Federation, the Richard King Mellon Foundation, and others, we have begun to answer those questions.

Our team is led by biologist Kerry Murphy, a graduate student under my direction. Collecting data in the wilderness is not possible without dedicated researchers, and the dangers can sometimes lead to tragedy. Last winter a young colleague, Greg Felzien, was killed by an avalanche while tracking a mountain lion through the snow.

We now estimate that the northern Yellowstone region holds 18 resident adults. Despite the area's vast size, it has just 300 square miles of suitable winter range for cats. The cougars behave much like the Idaho cats. The major differences are that, as in New Mexico, kittens leave the mother earlier and much fighting occurs.

I think territorial instability causes the fighting. Hunters north of the park often kill male cougars straying beyond its borders. Other mountain lions then move into a victim's territory and fight like new cats on a city block. In remote Idaho there was far less hunting pressure, and territories weren't continually up for grabs.

We can't explain why Yellowstone kittens leave their mothers earlier. In Idaho we thought kittens benefited by learning from their mothers how to kill elk, but elk are a big part of the diet in Yellowstone too.

Killing an elk demonstrates the lions' extraordinary predatory skills. While no one has witnessed the occurrence, Greg came close. He was tracking a big Yellowstone male in order to replace his radio collar and came across the huge carcass of a recently killed bull elk lying flat on its back. Its neck had been broken and its antlers driven nine inches into the ground by its fall. An animal weighing 150 pounds had destroyed one weighing 800.

Following the tracks in the snow, Greg saw how the lion had approached unseen and leaped on the bull. The startled animal bolted forward with the lion grasping and twisting the bull's massive neck muscles. The forward thrust, combined with the lion's exquisitely timed twisting, was probably what caused the bull's neck to break.

The most adept large carnivore in this country, the mountain lion evolved as a lone killer. In contrast, wolves hunt in packs when attacking a big elk. Bears, which mostly eat vegetation, are incompetent compared with lions.

Most carnivores are generalists, able to get by on varied diets. Coyotes will eat watermelons and grapes as well as meat. Lions, however, are specialized killing machines. Their teeth, claws, speed, and elusiveness are designed to bring down fresh meat. They prefer to kill their own food, rarely eating carrion. They are at the apex of the food chain, and thus they reflect the general health of the ecosystem.

We've learned that in Yellowstone packs of coyotes will usurp a lion's kill. So will bears. In parts of Montana, wolves are also displacing lions at their kills. In fact, one of our main concerns is to determine how wolves and mountain lions will coexist. There is no information on this, and lions inhabit every region of the West where officials are considering reintroducing wolves.

As mountain lion numbers increase, their coexistence with humans becomes a more urgent issue. In places such as the foothills of the Rocky Mountains outside Boulder, Colorado, people have moved into the lion's historic home. Certain individual lions show little fear of humans, and while most Boulder residents appreciate the presence of such a beautiful and mysterious animal, they are also concerned about the safety of their children and pets.

Occasionally lions—usually young and inexperienced—attack humans. California biologist Paul Beier has examined records of unprovoked attacks in the United States and Canada between 1890 and 1990. Of the 53 documented attacks nine were fatal. By comparison he notes that about 40 people a year die from bee stings and some 80 from lightning strikes in the United States.

Thirty of the 53 attacks on humans occurred in British Columbia. Twenty took place on Vancouver Island, where mountain lions have been hunted intensely since the island was settled. Vancouver lions are extremely aggressive. Perhaps the hunting pressure has genetically selected the most aggressive as survivors.

Mountain lions have created anxious moments recently in the United States, approaching people in Texas at Big Bend National Park, in northwestern Montana, and in California. And there have been tragedies. In 1989 a lion killed a five-year-old boy near Missoula. Two years later an 18-year-old Colorado man was killed while jogging on an abandoned logging road. Wildlife officials in the West now promote lion-safety guidelines, much as they do with bears. Visitors to lion habitat should carry a big stick and make noise as they hike to let the animal know they are approaching. Lions are intimidated by height, so if a cougar is sighted in the area, parents should put their children on their shoulders. If attacked, a person should not run, nor should he play dead. Stand firm, fight back, and yell—most people who have resisted an attack have successfully fought off the lion.

Despite their increasing and sometimes frightening presence, mountain lions have been winning greater protection. In 1990 in California, where perhaps as many as 5,000 lions range up and down the coastal mountains as well as the Sierra Nevada and southeastern deserts, voters handed lions a historic victory. A powerful coalition of environmentalists orchestrated the passage of Proposition 117, which bans sport hunting of lions. At a rally a young woman from the Mountain Lion Foundation told me, “We don't believe it is ethically or morally correct to kill such splendid animals just for trophies.”

The new law does allow depredatory animals to be killed, however. It also mandates that the state spend 30 million dollars a year for the next 30 years to protect the habitat of lions, deer, and various endangered species. Even so, environmentalist leader Margaret Owings worries: “We should be doing more. There are so many people and only so much land.”

Not everyone celebrated Proposition 117's victory. “We face real problems with increasing numbers of lions, and now it is difficult to do much about it,” says Terry Mansfield, the biologist in charge of the state's lion programs. “With more people and more lions, encounters will increase. I believe that in certain situations we need to hunt lions to protect property and lives.”

The mountain lion is also receiving extraordinary public support in Florida, where a subspecies, the Florida panther, has barely hung on in the pine forests and oak hammocks in and around the Big Cypress Swamp. Protected by state law since 1958, the panther was championed by a campaign of schoolchildren and named the official state animal in 1982.

The Florida Department of Transportation, moreover, has spent millions of dollars building wildlife crossings beneath Alligator Alley, the stretch of Interstate 75 from Fort Lauderdale to Naples. Cutting through lion habitat, the road has been a threat to the 30 to 50 remaining adults. Automobiles have killed five panthers since the highway was built in the 1960s.

I drove Alligator Alley recently, getting out at each wildlife crossing to look for panther tracks. Fences funnel animals approaching the road into the underpasses. I saw many signs of raccoons, otters, deer, opossums, and alligators. But no lion tracks. There just aren't that many panthers left. Nevertheless, Florida biologists assured me the underpasses are working.

Inevitably a much greater threat to the panthers is the state's population growth. “A thousand people a day are moving to Florida,” said state biologist Dave Maehr, who heads up panther research in southern Florida. “Panthers can live fairly close to our developments if we don't destroy their habitat. But they can't live in subdivisions or orange groves.”

Florida has also witnessed a controversy over captive breeding. Melody Roelke, the state's panther veterinarian since 1983, believes that individuals must be captured and bred in order to safeguard the wild population.

“The population is so low now and problems from inbreeding so dismal that any environmental glitch could wipe them out,” she said. “Captive breeding is an insurance policy.”

Others argue that it is just as dangerous to the subspecies—and ethically improper—to remove any animal from the wild.

After an intense political battle, the Florida Panther Interagency Committee approved a breeding program. In 1991 six kittens of known parentage were captured; kittens with different genetic traits will join them to build a breeding stock whose descendants will eventually be released. Someday, biologists hope to release panthers all across their original range. That takes in much of the Southeast.

Back home in Idaho I flew to Running Creek Ranch, a wilderness research facility I had established along the Selway River, thanks to a generous donation of land from Edward and Binnie Houghton. With funding from the National Geographic Society I had built a naturalistic enclosure of nearly two acres. In it we had placed Catrina, a five-year-old lioness reared in the Boise zoo that had been studied in an earlier enclosure experiment.

“Catrina had company the other morning,” reported ranch manager Tony Wright. “She and a wild female were practically touching noses at the fence.”

This was not the first wild cousin to visit. Tony had seen tracks of at least two wild males at the fence.

Our research plans called for Catrina to mate with another tame cat. We would then raise different litters under different conditions, taking one family from the enclosure before the kittens' eyes had opened. Conducting a series of experiments, we would test such behaviors as the kittens' response time to simulated prey, their attack modes on larger prey, and their responses to a human dummy. The goal is to learn which behaviors are innate and which are learned. Such research might help us understand, for instance, why some populations are more aggressive around humans.

I believe certain behaviors, such as aggression, are genetic. If so, we could change the behavior of wild populations by replacing more aggressive individuals with less aggressive ones, much as humans have done with domesticated animals. I also believe other behaviors, such as the killing of livestock, are learned. Lions kill sheep in some regions and not in others. We should be able to test this with one generation of captive offspring.

Our answers, unfortunately, will be delayed. Shortly after my return, Catrina escaped her enclosure. Mistaken for a wild lion, she was killed by a hunter half a mile away. We will soon continue the research with a new female. The answers will be invaluable as mountain lions and humans increasingly confront each other on common ground.

Flying high over the Idaho wilderness recently, I looked down and thought: Mountain lions have room here, the right kind of room. If we maintain it as wilderness and give them half a chance, they will always be here.

I thought too of Catrina and recalled what D. H. Lawrence wrote, lamenting the death of a lion in the mountains of his beloved New Mexico:

[blockquote]And I think in this empty world there was room for me
and a mountain lion.
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might
spare a million or two of humans
and never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face
of that slim yellow mountain lion!
[/blockquote]

Source: National Geographic, July 1992.

http://encarta.msn.com/sidebar_761593573/research_on_mountain_lions_in_the_american_west.html

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An impressive account of puma strength:
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More impressive accounts :

"The remarkable strength of the puma has been demonstrated time and again in its defensive actions, its attacks on formidable prey, and its removal of victims to places of concealment or retirement for feeding purposes. The powerful forepaws can overturn an assailant or disembowel one with a sweeping motion. Dogs are often dead before they hit the ground following a single blow to the head during the battle. The bite of the puma is bone crushing. Two Wyoming hunters saw a puma knock a full-grown buffalo cow to the ground in a smashing attack.
The puma can drag or carry its fallen prey for a considerable distance and has been known to transport a deer carcass up a tree to feed in security.
A puma killed the mule of a plantation owner in Guyana and dragged it across a trench half filled with water. Naturalist Sir Robert Schom-burgk, who recorded the incident in 1840, added: "So far as strength is concerned it is in no sense inferior to the jaguar." Zadock Thompson, in his early natural history of Vermont, records that a puma killed a large calf and carried it to a retiring place with a leap of fifteen feet over a ledge of rocks. In the Davis Mountains of Texas, a six-hundred-pound heifer was dragged out of a narrow spring-water hole and up the side of a mountain by a puma for safe keeping.
M.E. Musgrave, of the U.S. Biological Survey in Arizona, was the head of a force of men that killed more than six hundred pumas in the course of their work. Based on field observations, Musgrave made the following report on the strength of the animal: "I have seen a horse weighing eight or nine hundred pounds which a mountain lion has dragged twenty-five or thirty feet, as proven by tracks in the snow. Even more surprising is the fact that it sometimes carries off what it has killed. I have seen both deer and big calves some distance from where the kill has been made, with no evidence of dragging. To do this the lion first turns the animal on its back, picks it up by the brisket, all four feet sticking up in the air, and walks off with its own head held high.


From "Cougar" by Harold P. Danz."
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The Florida panther: Facts and figures

Times staff
In Print: Sunday, April 18, 2010

• The Florida panther was declared the state animal in 1982, chosen over the manatee and the alligator by a vote of the state's schoolchildren.

• They were on the original endangered species list, issued in 1967.

• When the Endangered Species Act passed in 1973, there were only 20 to 30 panthers left. Some state officials even believed they were extinct.

• The World Wildlife Fund hired a Texas puma hunter, Roy McBride, to travel to Florida in 1972 and find out if there were any panthers left. He found signs of panthers, and in 1973 captured one near Lake Okeechobee, a gaunt, tick-infested 9-year-old female.

• The average lifespan of a Florida panther in the wild is 12 years.

• Males average 130 pounds and measure 6 to 8 feet with the tail, while females average 80 pounds and measure 5 to 7 feet including the tail.

• Bobcats, which are far more common in the wild and more widely seen across the state, are often confused with panthers. But the Florida bobcat is much smaller than the Florida panther — in fact, it's not much larger than a domestic cat.

• Since 1990, much of the state's research into the Florida panther is financed by sales of the Florida panther specialty license plate. The plate brought in more than $1.3 million in 2008, the year with the most recent figures.

• Inbreeding among the small population led to genetic defects that would have doomed the species. In 1995, in a desperate gamble, state officials brought in eight Texas cougars to refresh the gene pool. Now there are more than 100 panthers.

• Scientists first began capturing panthers and attaching radio collars to them in 1981. Using signals from the radio collars they can study their movements. However, scientists do not have collars on all panthers. Currently 28 have them.

• In the 29 years since the panther-capture program began, only one panther has died during a capture. The tranquilizer dart intended to put the animal to sleep hit an artery, delivering the dosage too quickly. Controversy over the death nearly ended the program. Meanwhile, the animal was stuffed and put on display in Tallahassee. It currently stands near the entrance to the State Library of Florida.

• McBride still tracks panthers, now for the state Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. He calculates the panther population not only by studying the data from radio-tracking signals, but also from looking for signs they leave behind in the landscape: tracks, scat, scrapes and scratches on trees.

• Florida panthers do not roar. They do make sounds, though: chirps, peeps, whistles, purrs, moans, screams, growls and hisses.

• Their preferred diet consists of deer, wild hogs and some smaller animals, such as raccoons and armadillos.

• Panthers stalk their prey, moving in quietly. Although they do not chase down the deer and wild hogs they eat, they can spring as far as 15 feet for the kill. Panthers usually kill large prey by a bite to the back of the neck, severing the spinal cord.

• Panther kittens are reared by their mother in a den. The average litter size is two kittens.

• When kittens' eyes first open they are blue. Young cats' fur is spotted, and they have five rings on their tails. As they get older their eyes darken, and their fur and tail become more of a uniform tawny shade. There are no Florida panthers that are black.

• The mother leaves the kittens alone in the den to go out and forage for food. After making a kill, she will eat as much as she can and will return to the den to nurse her kittens.

• When the kittens are about 2 months old, they begin to tag along with their mother when she hunts. By 9 to 12 months they are catching small prey on their own, such as raccoons and armadillos.

• Until recently the primary cause of death for panthers was other panthers. But now the main killer of panthers is the car. A record 19 were run over in 2009.

Still Florida panthers

In the early 1990s Florida panthers were suffering from genetic problems that could have doomed the species. So in 1995, the state imported eight female Texas cougars to breed with the panthers. The genetic diversity was refreshed and the population boomed. The cougars were removed from the wild by 2003. The original kittens produced by the cross-breeding are considered Florida panthers, and therefore receive protection under the Endangered Species Act just like purebred ones. The reason: historically, back when panthers roamed the Southeast, the Florida panther subspecies interbred with the Texas subspecies.

• Their scientific name is Puma concolor coryi, a name that honors the first scientist to describe the Florida panther, Charles Cory.

• Panthers are nocturnal animals. They sleep during the day and hunt, travel and mate at night.

• As humans have encroached on their habitat, panthers have been unable to find as much of their usual prey and have attacked dogs, cats, goats and even a 200-pound horse.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/wildlife/the-florida-panther-facts-and-figures/1087968
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From Ursus:

AGE-RELATED VARIATION IN SKULLS OF THE PUMA (PUMA CONCOLOR)

SAMANTHA W. GAY AND TROY L. BEST Department of Zoology and Wildlife Science and Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, 331 Funchess Hall, Auburn University, AL 36849-5414

ABSTRACT : Measurements of skulls were used to determine if growth continues throughout the lifetime of a puma (Puma concolor) and if growth patterns differ between sexes. The dataset in- cluded 1,201 adult pumas and consisted of 14 cranial and 5 mandibular measurements. Ages (estimated by the amount of staining and wear of teeth) of specimens examined during our study suggested that few pumas live past ca. 9 years of age in the wild (16 of 609 adult males and 35 of 592 adult females). For both sexes, all of the characters showing no significant variation among age groups were those related to measurements of dentition, indicating that teeth reach their full-grown size by ca. 2 years of age. Growth of the cranium of pumas continues throughout most of the animal's life; males continue to grow to 7-9 years of age, and females continue to grow to 5-6 years of age.

Ursus arctos
 

Here is some of the info:
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As stated, skull width continued to increase until the 7-9 year old age class.


http://www.jstor.org/pss/1382720
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"the big horse-killing cat, the destroyer of deer, the lord of the stealthy murder facing his doom with a heart both craven and cruel. . ." T Roosevelt

More From Roosevelt -
"Among domestic animals, while they at times kill all, including, occasionally, horned cattle, they are especially destructive to horses. Among the first bands of horses brought to this plateau there were some of which the cougars killed every foal. The big males attacked full-grown horses. Uncle Jim had killed one big male which had killed a large draft-horse, and another which had killed two saddle-horses and a pack-mule, although the mule had a bell on its neck, which it was mistakenly supposed would keep the cougar away. We saw the skeleton of one of the saddle-horses. It was killed when snow was on the ground, and when Uncle Jim first saw the carcass the marks of the struggle were plain. The cougar sprang on its neck, holding the face with the claws of one paw, while his fangs tore at the back of the neck, just at the base of the skull; the other fore paw was on the other side of the neck, and the hind claws tore the withers and one shoulder and flank. The horse struggled thirty yards or so before he fell, and never rose again. The draft-horse was seized in similar fashion. It went but twenty yards before falling; then in the snow could be seen the marks where it had struggled madly on its side, plunging in a circle, and the marks of the hind feet of the cougar in an outside circle, while the fangs and fore talons of the great cat never ceased tearing the prey. In this case the fore claws so ripped and tore the neck and throat that it was doubtful whether they, and not the teeth, had not given the fatal wounds."
A COUGAR HUNT ON THE RIM OF THE GRAND CANYON

Wild Horses have also long been on the cougars diet -

Scientists tracking mountain lion to find out impact on wild horses Media Source: Reno Gazette-Journal (Nevada)
Author: Jeff DeLong

Movements of a mountain lion that may be making a staple diet out of wild horses are being tracked by scientists at University of Nevada, Reno.

The female lion, trapped in the Virginia Range last month and fitted with a radio collar, may provide researchers with important clues into the elusive animal's behavior and predation habits, said David Thain, an assistant professor of veterinary medicine.

"It's an important study because we still don't have a clear idea what the cats in our local mountains are doing," Thain said. "By tracking them, we'll be able to get a better sense of what they're doing, what species they're eating."

The current study is an offshoot of previous research Thain and colleagues started in 2005, when he was state veterinarian for the Nevada Department of Agriculture. That work, part of the state's effort to control and stabilize the wild horse population in the Virginia Range, attempted to determine how wild horse behavior is altered when mares are injected with contraceptive chemicals.

While doing field work associated with that research, UNR graduate student Meeghan Gray kept coming across the remains of dead horses, generally foals or young adults with trauma to the neck or chest that were partially covered in dirt.

"It was pretty obvious a mountain lion was doing this," Gray said. "They're really the only thing that can take down an adult horse or a young horse."

While known to prey upon livestock, mountain lions more commonly hunt deer and antelope, rabbits and beavers, Thain said.

"We were surprised a mountain lion would be feeding on them," Thain said, adding that the number of dead foals or young horses Gray was finding, about one or two a week, led researchers to wonder if the lion was making wild horses its primary source of food.

They wanted to find out.

Since September, researchers attempted to trap the lion but didn't succeed until early December. The 6-foot-long, 125-pound cougar was trapped, sedated and fitted with a global positioning system collar.

After its release, the lion was set free to roam the Virginia Range. The collar beams the lion's location to UNR researchers four times a day. By checking on the locations where the lion was during the time of day it was most likely to hunt and feed, researchers hope to determine more about what it is eating and whether horses are indeed its primary source of food.

It worked last Wednesday. Gray found another dead horse where radio telemetry indicated the lion had been the previous night.

"Sure enough, it was the lion's kill," Thain said. "We would like to get a good understanding of what kind of prey it's living off of, whether it stays with horses all year long or whether it switches" to other prey.

Information collected from the lion research should show more than what the animal eats. Researchers also hope to determine how far the big cat roams and how often it might enter areas more densely inhabited by people.

As more people move into areas abutting the backcountry, more interactions between lions and humans are likely. Reports of lions wandering through residential areas of the foothills are common, usually in spring, according to the Nevada Department of Wildlife.

In February 1998, a mother mountain lion and her two yearlings were shot after being spotted near homes and within a quarter mile of Verdi Elementary School. Experts determined the cougars posed a danger because they were using the area as a hunting ground.

"We do know that mountain lions come down into urban areas, and we want to see what this one is doing," Thain said.

http://www.mountainlion.org/newsroom_article.asp?news_id=564






Sean Shea, a research biologist with the United States Geological Survey, tracks mountain lions for the wildlife department and guides hunting trips in Nevada.
They’re solid muscle,” he said. “You gotta think, they take down anything, you name it.”
Shea even scared a lion off a kill — an adult mustang. He examined the wild horse carcass to confirm the lion killed it and then took photos to document the unusual sight.
On the trail of the mountain lion


Thought these pictures were lost forever in the Photobucket bribery scandal, but I found them again! :)

"Preliminary results demonstrate that while the cougar population as a whole subsists
primarily on deer, diets are remarkably diverse and individual preference for prey types
appears to play an important role in this diversity. Some individuals, for instance,
consume primarily deer, others bighorn sheep, and still others focus on feral horses
(which are common in west central Alberta). Distinct differences between the predatory
behavior of males and females have also been noted and males tend to kill more large
prey (elk, moose, and feral horses) than do females. "

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Attached File North_of_49__Ongoing_Cougar_Research_in_Alberta__Canada_.pdf (1.9 MB)
Edited by Taipan, Jan 5 2018, 11:53 PM.
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Cougar killing Mule deer Buck
Edited by Taipan, Apr 17 2012, 11:21 PM.
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Ferocious appetites: Study finds mountain lions may be eating more than previously believed

By BRETT FRENCH Of The Gazette Staff The Billings Gazette | Posted: Thursday, December 9, 2010 12:30 am

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Mountain lions were treed in the winter to capture them for collaring in the Canadian study. The study found that adult male lions were more likely to kill less but bigger prey than females.

Mountain lions, the largest members of the cat family in North America, may be heartier eaters than some researchers originally estimated.

“One of the most interesting things we found was how much more prey they kill in summer,” said Kyle Knopff, lead author of a three-year Canadian mountain lion study that was recently published in the Journal of Wildlife Management. “Just how focused they become on young of the year ungulates was surprising.”

GPS aids study

Knopff is basing his conclusions on data collected from more than 1,500 kill sites while tracking 54 cougars with GPS collars. The collars allowed the University of Alberta researchers, including his wife Aliah, to move in quickly after a kill to identify what was taken and by which lion.

In the journal article Knopff writes that some previous studies “may have failed to identify higher kill rates for large carnivores in summer because methods in those studies did not permit researchers to locate many neonates or because sample size was too small.”

The use of GPS collars enabled Knopff and his colleagues to collect more data. As a result, he found that mountain lions killed more deer, elk and moose during the summer by focusing on juveniles and actually killed fewer animals in winter. The information contradicts previous studies conducted in Idaho.

“The Idaho estimates differed from our summer estimates by as much as 365 percent in terms of frequency of killing and 538 percent in terms of prey biomass,” Knopff wrote. “Because kill rate fundamentally influences the effect predators have on their prey, the discrepancy between studies represents a substantial difference in the capacity for cougars to impact ungulates.”

Built to kill

The study was conducted over 10 years in west-central Alberta, including the Bow Valley, Jasper National Park, portions of Banff National Park and in Clearwater County east of Banff. The terrain of the study area was a mixture of lodgepole pine and spruce forests at elevations ranging from 2,500 to 9,300 feet. The mountain lions' prey included deer, elk, bighorn sheep, coyotes, feral horses, beaver and porcupines.

Cougars aren't easy creatures to study. The secretive animals range widely to hunt - 250 to 600 square miles for males, 60 to 125 square miles for females.

Adult male cougars can weigh 140 to 165 pounds. One male cougar in Knopff's study tipped the scales at 180 pounds and primarily fed on moose and feral horses. Females typically weigh around 100 pounds. From nose to tail the big cats can measure 6.5 to 10 feet long. The average lifespan for a male is 8 to 10 years, 12 to 14 for females.

Great leapers and sprinters, cougars kill by latching onto their prey with their front claws and powerful forelegs and then biting the windpipe or spine along the neck with their large canine teeth. For smaller prey, lions may crush the animal's skull. On rare occasions lions have been known to attack humans.

“Our kill rate estimates indicate that adult cougars are highly effective predators, killing at rates at the upper end of those recorded for wolves in both frequency and biomass,” Knopff wrote.

In one prey encounter they studied, Knopff said a cougar brought down a feral horse less than 30 yards from where it attacked.

“I think our study showed they are very efficient predators,” he said.

Because of their adaptability, cougars are found from the Yukon to the Andes of South America, a larger range than any other big mammal in the Americas.

Study findings

In studying cougar kill sites, the researchers publicized a couple of interesting details. One is that that female mountain lions with kittens kill more deer; the other is that adult male lions kill larger but fewer animals.

“We had one male cougar kill 18 moose in less than a year,” Knopff said.

Based on the Canadian data, the cougars killed on average .8 ungulates (mainly whitetail deer and moose) a week, an average of about 18 pounds a day. That statistic varied widely, though, based on the individual - from a low of .24 ungulates to a high of 1.38, or 18 to 41 pounds a day.

Those ungulates targeted tended to be young of the year or adults with yearlings, largely because they were easier to subdue.

Deer made up more than 75 percent of the diet for adult female lions in winter and summer. Adult males had a more varied diet, concentrating on moose (36 percent) in the summer and deer (44 percent) in the winter. All told, adult males targeted large ungulates for 62 percent of their diet. Subadult lions also ate more deer than other species, but like human teenagers they also varied their diet more opportunistically than adults.

On average, adult males killed an estimated 10,300 pounds of biomass annually compared to 9,400 pounds killed by females with young kittens.

Humans vs. cougars

Aliah Knopff said her portion of the study focused more on cougar-human interactions and the lion's habitat selection.

She said that as people have continued to build in more remote areas, cougars have had to adapt.

“These are actually quite adaptable carnivores,” she said, from changing their movements to become more nocturnal and avoid humans, to finding undisturbed islands within development to live in - such as along pipelines or well sites. The same can't be said for many other carnivores.

These more urban lions are mainly limited by human tolerance, she said. The people in rural Alberta who were interviewed for the study valued cougars highly, but not if they were killing pets or livestock.

“That's the challenge for cougar conservation when the backyard is becoming more overlapping,” she said.

Possible uses

Lion hunting is allowed in many Western states, including Montana and Wyoming. Hunters track and tree the big cats with hounds. Cougar kills are carefully regulated by state wildlife agencies.

Knopff writes that the Canadian study could be used by game managers to better calculate mountain lions' take of game animals and in turn reduce lion numbers to benefit deer, elk and moose populations. For example, hunting female cougars could reduce the number of deer taken in a specific area.

But such management can also produce unpredictable outcomes, he added. A lion population that is younger may lead to increased confrontations with humans.

http://billingsgazette.com/lifestyles/recreation/article_d9cf046b-2c47-539f-a267-972e72e570b6.html
Edited by Taipan, Oct 13 2017, 01:30 PM.
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Camera catches eight cougars together

Rich Landers The Spokesman-Review


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http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2011/feb/16/camera-catches-eight-cougars-together/
Edited by Taipan, Oct 13 2017, 01:32 PM.
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The Eastern Cougar in the United States is Extinct

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Seven decades after the last reported sighting, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service declared the eastern cougar extinct on Wednesday and recommended that it be removed from the nation’s endangered species list.
There’s one wrinkle, though: it may not be extinct, exactly.
Scientists are moving toward the conclusion that the eastern cougar was erroneously classified as a separate subspecies in the first place. As a result of a genetic study conducted in 2000, most biologists now believe there is no real difference between the western and eastern branches of the cougar family.
Either way, the “eastern” cougar as such is no longer with us. Any recent sightings in the cougar’s traditional historic range, which stretched from eastern Ontario and Michigan eastward to Maine and southward to Georgia, Tennessee and Missouri, were actually sightings of its relatives, the Fish and Wildlife Service said.
“It’s extinct,” said Mark McCollough, a wildlife biologist with the agency’s offices in Maine, referring to the official determination by his agency.
“But it’s not?” he was asked.
“But it’s not,” he confirmed. “It may well return to part of its range.”
Cougar populations from the West are following the eastward migration of the coyote, Dr. McCollough said, and some have settled in the Dakotas. At least one breeding pair is now in Nebraska, he added.
The reclusive cougars — also called pumas, catamounts, mountain lions and, perhaps most fittingly, “ghost cats” — came under siege in the eastern United States starting in the 1700s, when they were hunted by European settlers. States put bounties on the cats with the goal of protecting livestock, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
“There was a general attitude back in the late 1700s and early 1800s that any predator was a bad predator and some were created worse than others and cougars were among the worst,” Dr. McCollough said.
The last confirmed eastern cougar was trapped in the late 1930s, the agency said.
Martin Miller, the chief of the endangered species division in the service’s Northeastern office, said that many sightings had been reported since then, but that virtually all of those cats were determined either to be from the West or to be South American pumas that were bought as pets and then released. The eastern cougar was listed as an endangered species in 1973.
Mr. Miller said in an interview that no regulations or restrictions were ever imposed in an effort to help the eastern cougar recover, although a recovery plan drafted in 1982 “held out hope, expressed the possibility that a population still existed in remote areas.”
Also as a result of genetic research, Dr. McCollough said, the Florida panther, which is under protection under the Endangered Species Act, might eventually be reclassified as a distinct population segment of the larger cougar family.
A handful of other species on the nation’s endangered species list are presumed to be extinct and may eventually be recommended for delisting, including the Bachman’s warbler and the little Mariana fruit bat, the agency says.
A 2008 report to Congress by the Fish and Wildlife Service said that of more than 1,200 species protected under the Endangered Species Act, 19 were presumed extinct.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/science/earth/03cougar.html?_r=1
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In Lion Country
What is making cougars in Southern California seem so bold?

By Sylvia Wright

[Please note that paragraph seven contains an inaccuracy. Iris Kenna was not the first person killed by a cougar in California in 80 years. Her death on Dec. 10, 1994, was preceded by that of UC Davis alumna Barbara Barsalou Schoener '75, who was killed nearly eight months earlier.]
When they left the dead deer in the pickup bed on the night of March 5, UC Davis researchers Ken Logan and Linda Sweanor weren't too concerned about leaving the carcass unsecured in cougar country. The 90-pound doe, after all, was four feet off the ground, surrounded by the 16-inch-high truck bed and stiff with death and cold. So they merely joked that one of them should put on night-vision goggles and stand guard. Then they went to bed.

Partners in research and marriage, Logan and Sweanor had spent their careers studying cougars. They were the principal investigators on the most extensive cougar study ever done, in New Mexico's San Andres Mountains in 1985–95. Sweanor's thesis for her 1990 master's degree at the University of Idaho was on cougar social organization; Logan's doctoral dissertation there was on cougar ecology. So, last January, when they settled into rugged Cuyamaca Rancho State Park above San Diego to lead a new UC Davis research project, they had studied cougars more intensively than anyone in the world.

Even so, the Cuyamaca cougars would show them something new.



Biologists began thinking of Cuyamaca's cougars as a breed apart in the late 1980s, when a growing number of visitors reported encounters with cats that were unusually bold. "Typically, lions stay away from people," said Cuyamaca park superintendent Jim Burke. "In 25 years in other California state parks, I had only seen one. But when I got to Cuyamaca, it was pretty common that people were seeing mountain lions. It's a whole different world."

Cuyamaca's woods and meadows are a deer paradise, and deer are the primary prey of cougars (also known as mountain lions, catamounts and pumas). Cuyamaca is also a human paradise; just 40 minutes from metropolitan San Diego, it has 120 miles of trails for hiking, biking and horseback riding and 416,000 visitors annually.

By the 1990s, it seemed like deer, lions and people were often traveling the same trails. Park records show that from 1993 to 2000, visitors reported seeing mountain lions 201 times. Sixteen times, the lion behaved in a way that rangers and game wardens deemed threatening to human safety. Nine times, that behavior led officials to kill the lions. In September 1993 and January 1994, officials took the extraordinary action of closing the entire park to visitors while a potentially dangerous cougar was tracked down. That meant emptying out campgrounds, clearing hikers off the trails and turning away new park visitors.

Then, on Dec. 10, 1994, the worst occurred—a cougar killed school counselor Iris Kenna as she hiked alone near Cuyamaca Peak. It was the first time a cougar had killed a person in California in 80 years. Game warden Lt. Bob Turner of the California Department of Fish and Game watched the site where Kenna's body was found; when a lion arrived there later the same day, Turner shot it. Tests showed it was the animal that had killed Kenna.

In January 1996, a mountain lion charged a woman on horseback in the park. When Fish and Game wardens arrived at that scene a few hours later to investigate, a mountain lion came toward them. Again, Turner had to kill the animal. In 1998, Turner shot four lions in two days after they threatened campers and their dogs at the park's Los Vaqueros horse camp.

In the meantime, just a few miles to the east, researchers from the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine were conducting what seemed to be an unrelated study. There, in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, an endangered population of fewer than 400 bighorn sheep was shrinking fast. Beginning in 1992, wildlife veterinarian and ecologist Walter Boyce, director of the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center, led the effort to find out why. Using novel investigative techniques, including DNA fingerprinting, Boyce and his graduate students discovered that disease was one key factor, but more important was predation: Of the 61 radio-collared sheep that died during the study, cougars killed 42.

"That was entirely unexpected," said Boyce. "We had assumed, based on all the available evidence, that infectious disease was to blame. But as soon as we began following the radio-collared animals, it became obvious that mountain lions were the major cause of death."

Relying heavily on the results of their research, one of Boyce's doctoral students, Esther Rubin, led the writing of the federal recovery plan for the sheep, which by that time numbered about 300. The plan was candid about the cougar issue. It said that if high levels of predation continued, it might be necessary to kill lions to help the bighorn survive. "But the ultimate goal of conservation efforts should be to establish a healthy ecosystem in which lion removal is not necessary," Boyce said. "If we were going to have both bighorn sheep and mountain lions in the Peninsular Ranges, we needed a much better understanding of lion ecology and predator-prey relationships."

Cuyamaca rangers were saying much the same thing about people and mountain lions in their park. "We just didn't have any information," Burke recalls. "We didn't even know how many lions were out there. We talked about it—wouldn't it be great to find out more about the lions and humans, to provide a safe place for both of them?"

For Boyce, when the cougar killed Iris Kenna in Cuyamaca, the two situations merged into one. "That really heightened my awareness that this wasn't a single-species issue or a single-location issue," Boyce said. "The public-safety component of cougar biology was the opposite side of the coin to the endangered-species component, bighorn sheep."

Now Boyce began to envision a new, larger study that would look at the situation long-term on a regional scale. He named it the Southern California Ecosystem Health Project and began the painstaking work of building political and financial support. His key allies were experts like Mark Jorgensen, a resource ecologist for California State Parks, who grew up in the Anza-Borrego Desert and returned from college to work for its preservation; husband and wife team Steve and Alison Torres, the biologists for the California Department of Fish and Game responsible for the management of sheep, mountain lions and deer in the entire state; and Esther Rubin, who had finished her Ph.D. program and was a conservation fellow studying bighorn sheep for the Zoological Society of San Diego.

The ecosystem study that Boyce and his colleagues envisioned was unprecedented. They wanted to concurrently examine the relationships of lions, humans, sheep—and deer, which seemed to be the factor that drew lions into close proximity with both sheep and people. Scientifically, there had never been a study that concurrently examined the relationships of three wildlife species and humans, with a goal of management recommendations for the welfare of all. Geographically, the study area would encompass more than 500 square miles in contiguous lands including Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Cleveland National Forest and other federal and state lands. Financially, the study would cost at least $1 million for the first three years.

Logistically, the researchers would need to put radio collars on as many deer, sheep and lions as they could catch. UC Davis would employ, besides Boyce, four biologists to work full time on the collaring, tracking and data-analysis elements of the project. Fish and Game would supply extensive support for the collaring and tracking, including helicopter time, hardware and expertise. State Parks would open its files on cougar encounters in the parks, help the UC Davis team survey human activities in the park and give the team wide latitude in capturing and tracking wildlife within park boundaries.

Lastly, there were the political aspects. For a creature that most Californians will never see, the mountain lion is remarkably charismatic. In 1990, Californians approved Proposition 117, banning cougar hunting. In 1996, even after cougar numbers had begun to rise, and the cats had killed Kenna in Cuyamaca and Barbara Schoener near Sacramento, voters again endorsed cougar protection. Yet hunting interests continued to lobby for lion management, while sheep advocates were nervously watching the lions eating away at the Peninsular Ranges bighorn population. In that political climate, Boyce feared the plan to study the lions might be seen as a threat to their protected status. As he worked to build support for the new study, Boyce stressed the importance of objective research: UC Davis intended, he said, "to get good science done, and make it available to wildlife managers and the public so it could be implemented into wise policy decisions to ensure public safety and the best stewardship of natural resources."

By mid-2000, the project was coming together. Boyce had amassed $1 million in cash and in-kind commitments—enough to carry the project for three of the 10 years he felt necessary. An anonymous Southern California conservationist donated $225,000; Mark Jorgensen committed $270,000 from State Parks; Fish and Game's Deer Herd Management Plan Implementation Project gave $220,000 and its Bighorn Sheep Management Plan committed $160,000 of funds it received from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; and the Zoological Society of San Diego agreed to cover the costs of Esther Rubin's research. "We were pooling our resources to address questions we're all interested in," said Steve Torres, chief of Fish and Game's Bighorn Sheep and Mountain Lion Conservation program.

With a plan and financing in hand, Boyce now had to find his lead cougar biologists, and he knew the two he wanted: Ken Logan and Linda Sweanor. But Logan and Sweanor were living in Moscow, Idaho, while Logan finished his Ph.D. dissertation on the 10-year San Andres cougar study. Boyce wasn't sure whether, having worked so long in the San Andres wilderness, the pair could be persuaded to come to urbanized San Diego County.

"The San Andres Mountains are one of the last remaining areas where cougar behavior is minimally influenced by people," Boyce explained. "For Ken and Linda, Cuyamaca was exactly the opposite: an area where cougars and people can't avoid each other." In the end, that was what won them over. "They know that cougar preservation has to involve people."



Sweanor, Logan and their 6-year-old son, Ori, moved into a cabin in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park in January. Field biologists Jim Bauer and Casey Lydon signed on as scientific aides, jointly employed by UC Davis and California Department of Fish and Game. Everyoneworking on the project attended a Fish and Game wildlife-capture refresher course. Then, on Jan. 23, Fish and Game biologist Randy Botta was trapping wild turkeys about 400 yards from the cabin when he found lion tracks. To Logan and Sweanor, the size of the pad prints suggested the cat was a male, and a big one. Backtracking, Sweanor found another set of tracks, smaller; it looked like the big male had a female friend in the neighborhood. The research team was elated, particularly Sweanor and Logan. "The biggest thrill was finally being back out in the field again, after being in front of a computer for two years, writing up the San Andres findings," Sweanor said. "It was just nice to be in lion country again."

After finding the tracks nearby, Sweanor and Logan realized that a lion might walk by and see Ori in his bedroom. Next day, Logan walked behind the cabin and saw lion tracks in the snow, five feet from the house. They closed Ori's bedroom curtains.

In the last week of February, six inches of snow fell at the cabin. Logan and Sweanor spent Feb. 23 and 24 working down the mountain with Botta, Boyce and other biologists, radio-collaring deer for the study. On the morning of Feb. 25, Sweanor stepped onto the cabin porch and discovered a cougar had walked under her floorboards in the night. A trail of big paw prints in the snow led directly up to the cabin, disappeared and emerged on the opposite side.

Logan tracked the big male for a mile to the park boundary. Then, confident it would be traveling by the cabin again soon, Logan returned home. He and Sweanor would try to catch and radio-collar this Cuyamaca regular. They would need bait; they asked the park rangers to get them a roadkill deer.



Mountain lions are carnivores and will eat a wide range of animals. Their favorite food is deer, and they are supremely adapted for killing such large prey. Weighing 70 to 160 pounds and stretching 5 to 7 feet long from nose to tail tip, they are equal in size to most deer. Their short muzzles, long legs and powerful shoulders are heavily muscled for bringing down struggling animals.

Cuyamaca chief ranger Laura Itogawa called Sweanor and Logan late on March 5 with the location of a roadkill doe. "Better get it fast, before someone takes it home for dinner," Itogawa said. Around 10 p.m., Logan wrestled the carcass into the research project's Toyota Tacoma pickup; back at the cabin, he left the dead deer in the pickup bed, tailgate up. He and Sweanor made their jokes about guarding the carcass, then slept.

"The next morning, Ken went out to the truck at about 7," Sweanor recalled. "He came back in and said, 'Well, the carcass is gone.' My first thought was that, like Laura had said, someone had taken the deer for venison. And we went out there, and there was no deer—just two deer hair stuck on the side of the truck."

A cougar apparently had caught wind of the carcass, daringly jumped into the truck to investigate, and hauled the deer out of the truck bed and out of sight. It had carried the carcass so high off the ground that Logan and Sweanor had trouble picking up a drag trail on their hands and knees. When they finally did pick one up, it led them the length of two football fields to a cache in dense chaparral.

"It made us both laugh," Sweanor said. "It was amazing to see that at 10 o'clock one night that carcass was in the back of the truck and by 7 the next morning it was gone, and to have a lion actually find it and take it away so cleanly. We'd never worked with cats that had been in close proximity to humans. But here, there are so many people around, and cats so close to human habitation—it's different. We're definitely going to be learning some new things."

Around the cache site, the biologists set their snares. Two nights later, they made the first lion capture of the new project: a healthy, 4-year-old, 140-pound male. He was tranquilized, fitted with a radio collar, designated Male 1 and released. A day and a half later, Sweanor located his radio signal 5.5 miles northwest of the capture site, near Temescal Creek, in good deer habitat.



On March 28, the team collared a second male. M2 was 2 to 3 years old and weighed 109 pounds. As summer progressed, Logan and scientific aide Bauer settled into a routine of searching for lion signs and settingand checking snares. Sweanor began amassing data on previous human-lion interactions in the park, and she and scientific aide Lydon monitored the collared deer and lions. Bighorn specialist Rubin continued to analyze bighorn sheep data with Boyce and made plans with Fish and Game and State Parks to put radio collars on more sheep in the fall.

On July 14, Logan and Sweanor's daybreak snare-check revealed cougar M3 in a snare in lower Stonewall Creek. He was a youngster, only about 8 to 10 months old and weighing 58 pounds. His mother was nearby. The team had been tracking and trying to catch these individuals for several weeks. M3 was fitted with a radio collar that would expand to accommodate his growth and released. In the next few days, he and his mother were seen at a deer kill two miles south of where he was captured.

By the time the summer visitor season ended in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, Sweanor was starting to build a picture of the lions' movements. In typical cougar fashion, they covered a lot of ground. M1 tended to ramble throughout the park and to the west, covering a range of at least 140 square miles—three times the size of the park. M2's range covered about 76 square miles, including large areas south and east of the park. M3 and his mother were moving in and out of the park, staying put for a few days each time they killed a deer.

Sometimes, as Sweanor climbs Cuyamaca ridges to scan for M1's radio signal, she thinks back to that night in March when he stole away the deer carcass. "I know that mountain lions are strong. They have very powerful forelegs and claws, and incredibly strong, short jaws with tremendous musculature—much stronger than a wolf. A single lion can pull down a bull elk six times its weight," she mused.

"Still, that cat pulling the deer out of the truck—I would have liked to have seen it myself."

http://ucdavismagazine.ucdavis.edu/issues/fall01/feature_2.html
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Cougar kills livestock and guard dog

January 30, 2008

Sometime after midnight last Thursday, Jake Dyck, alerted by the barking of his house dogs at his Bulkley Lake home west of Rose Lake, went outside and shone a spotlight around the yard to make sure the sheep were okay. Not spotting anything amiss, Dyck retired for the evening. In the morning he discovered his Anatolian Shepherd guard dog lying dead under the sheep shelter, with bite wounds to the back of the head; and one of his sheep had been killed and dragged off by a cougar.

“It was deep snow, you could easily see the trail where he had dragged it,” said Dyck. “The cat had hidden the sheep under the thick branches of a small spruce tree.”

Dyck said the guard dog he lost was an Anatolian Shepherd, a dog specially bred for the job.

The Anatolian Shepherd is one of the ‘giant’ breed of dogs and was developed specifically for guarding flocks. The dogs have been used for thousands of years by Nomads of the Anatolia plateau, a high steppe-like grassland in central Turkey, to guard flocks of livestock from wolves, jackals, bears, and even cheetahs. The breed was developed to be independent and forceful, responsible on its own for guarding it’s masters flocks. Bred for courage, strength, speed, agility and endurance the 100-150 pound male dogs make ideal guards,while the females are kept for breeding.

It took a powerful predator to bring down a dog of this size and ability.

“The cougar bit him in the back of the head and its teeth went right through the skull and into the brain,” said Dyck. “That’s some power.”

This was not the first incident in which the Dycks have lost livestock to wild predators.

“Two years ago we had a grizzly that came in and killed a bunch of sheep,” he said. “I shot it from the doorstep. I think it took forty-some sheep that year.”

Dyck said they lost another large bunch of sheep last year, on pasture in Palling, that just vanished without a trace.

“We couldn’t find hide nor hair of them,” said Dyck, “we never did find out what got them.”

Upon discovery of the slain dog and the dead sheep Dyck called Jeff Palm, a conservation officer in Burns Lake.

“I attended the site and inspected the carcasses, and it was apparent from the wound marks that it was a cougar that had done it,” said Palm. “ I would say it was an adult cat just by the ability and the power it had to kill the animals and the penetration of each side of the dog’s skull with the large canine teeth and stuff.”

There were a lot of tracks around the site, but a fresh skiff of snow made identification difficult.

“By the wound patterns, I’m confident it was a cougar,” Palm said.

He added it is typical for a cat to feed on the organs high in the body cavity as in this case where it had broken through the sheep’s ribs to eat the heart; whereas wolves and coyotes will generally feed from the tail end up, starting at the lower belly.

Asked to speculate on the sequence of events at the scene; if he thought the dog could have been caught unawares from behind, Palm replied that it was difficult to say.

“I’m not sure,” he said, “it’s hard to speculate. It could have been a bit of a fight, I mean a dog isn’t going to last long alone against a big cat.”

Palm added that whatever happened it was clear the dog had been doing his job and that he died defending the sheep.

Palm said he had a good look around the scene as sometimes the culprit will be nearby and available for removal, but that was not the case this time.

“In this case the cat was nowhere to be found, the snow was really deep and difficult and it’s a wooded area, so we contacted a local hunter who has hounds, and he attended the area and tried to locate the cat, but because of the conditions he wasn’t able to run the dogs successfully to find the animal,” Palm said.

Kyle Schpansky described the scene when he got his dogs out to the farm.

“It had snowed the night it happened [Friday morning] and it snowed Saturday morning as well, so we couldn’t get a good track, there was nothing fresh, everything was under three quarters of an inch of snow. So now we’re waiting until we get another fresh track,” he said.

Schpansky said the deep snow made difficult going for his hounds.

“The cougar makes as much of a track through the snow as a dog; it will drag it’s belly in this kind of snow, so they [the dogs] can follow it pretty good. It’s tough on them though, a long hunt is tough, so we’re hoping for a short one,” he said.

The hounds chase the cat by scent until they get close enough to put it up a tree, where it can then be shot by the hunter, or drugged and relocated.

Both Schpansky and Dyck figure the big cat will be back.

Although it is difficult to obtain an accurate estimate of these elusive cats, an indication of a stable population in the central interior is that there is currently an active hunting season for them. This hunting season is subject to cancellation on short notice anytime the Wildlife Branch feels two many cougars [especially females] are being harvested in an area.

“Across central and southern B.C. we have a strong population of cougars,” said Palm, “and from time to time they do take livestock, and this is what has taken place here.”

He added that to have wolves and bears and cougars roaming our forests is an excellent indicator of a heathy wilderness.


http://www.bclocalnews.com/bc_north/lakesdistrictnews/news/14622932.html

Read more: http://carnivora.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=userrecentposts&user=reddhole#ixzz1jGUxDLOU
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Panther found dead in Hendry County, killed in fight with another panther

By Naples Daily News staff report
Posted May 21, 2012 at 5:27 p.m.

LABELLE — Florida wildlife officials reported finding an endangered Florida panther dead Monday in a Hendry County orange grove, about five miles southeast of the Hendry County prison.

The 2-year-old male panther had a radio tracking collar and was discovered during a routine panther telemetry monitoring flight, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission reported. Biologists said the panther died in a fight with another panther.

So far this year, 11 panthers have been found dead, including four hit by vehicles, five in fights with another panther and two whose cause of death is listed as unknown.

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2012/may/21/panther-found-dead-hendry-county-killed-fight-anot/
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Mountain lions kill collared wolves in Bitterroot

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Mountain lions have killed several wolves in the Bitterroot in recent months.

19 hours ago • By PERRY BACKUS - Ravalli Republic
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Mountain lions are taking a toll on Liz Bradley’s collared wolves in the Bitterroot this year.

Since January, two wolves radio-collared by the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks wolf biologist have been killed by mountain lions.

Last week, she found the latest dead wolf in the Warm Springs area, west of Sula.

Like all the others she’s investigated since 2009, the wolf’s skull showed a severe puncture wound – a trademark of a lion kill.

In the Sula case, the lion ate a good portion of the wolf and then covered the carcass with debris.

“It’s hard to say what happened,” Bradley said. “There was no elk or deer carcass nearby that they may have been competing over.”

There was, however, a deer carcass near the dead wolf she found in the Carlton Creek area west of Lolo in January. In that case, the wolf wasn’t consumed, but it did have the same canine tooth puncture through the skull.

“That one was probably a conflict,” she said.

Last year, Bradley found two dead wolves that were probably killed by mountain lions. One was in Davis Creek, east of Lolo, and the other was south of Conner.

In both cases, the carcasses were too far decomposed for positive identification on the cause of death. Both had clear puncture wounds through the top of their skulls.

In 2009, the first apparent lion-killed wolf was discovered in the West Fork area.

The number of wolf and lion encounters is unusual.

“I haven’t heard of it happening anywhere else,” Bradley said. “It’s pretty interesting that the Bitterroot has had so many.”

Large predators sometimes do kill each other. There have been documented cases of that happening in many places around the West.

“They compete for the same resource,” she said. “When there is overlap in areas where you have lots of prey, conflicts occur.”

Four of the five wolves that Bradley knows were probably killed by mountain lions were fitted with a radio collar.

“It’s too bad because we don’t have those now,” she said.

At the end of last year, Bradley had collars in seven packs in the Bitterroot. She’s now down to four.

“Ideally, we would have at least half of the packs collared in the Bitterroot,” she said.

Bradley estimates there are 14 packs in the Bitterroot, which includes the area around Lolo all the way down the east and west forks of the Bitterroot River.

On average, pack sizes are smaller in the Bitterroot following last year’s hunting season. The largest pack now has nine wolves. Most have four to seven adults, with several including just a male and female.

Going into the pup season, Bradley estimated that there were between 60 and 70 adult wolves in the entire Bitterroot area.

“That’s a little bit lower than what we had in 2011,” she said. “We had about 80 last year. We had some mortality.”

Bradley won’t know this year’s numbers of pups until sometime later this summer.

She is asking the public for help in locating packs for collaring this spring, especially in the Darby and Sula areas, as well as the north Bitterroot Valley.

Sightings can be reported by going to the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks website under the wolf section. For recent wolf sightings of multiple animals, Bradley asks that people call her cell phone at (406) 865-0017.

“I’m especially interesting in hearing about sightings in the Sula area right now,” she said.

If anyone stumbles across a dead wolf or mountain lion, she would be interested in hearing about that too.

Reach reporter Perry Backus at 363-3300 or pbackus@ravallirepublic.com.

http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/mountain-lions-kill-collared-wolves-in-bitterroot/article_68c0c60c-d792-59e3-b736-5b10c17eb10a.html
Edited by Taipan, Oct 13 2017, 01:33 PM.
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