Coexisting With Mountain Lions

Mountain lion, also known as ghost cat, puma, and catamount, is a species of cat found in the United States and Central/South America. They have various names in different regions. As the weather gets warmer in California, more people are entering mountain lion territory. An expert from the Mountain Lion Foundation advises on coexisting safely with these animals. Mountain lion populations are difficult to estimate, but there are likely between 4,500 and 6,500 in California. Mountain lions play a vital role as predators in the ecosystem, increasing biodiversity and controlling deer populations. They also help reduce tick-borne illnesses and parasitic diseases. Coexisting with mountain lions benefits both humans and the environment. Do you know what the ghost cat, mountain screamer, puma, and catamounts all have in common? They are actually all names for the same species of cat, most commonly here in the United States, known as mountain lions or cougars. The mountain lion, as we will refer to it throughout this episode, holds the Guinness Book of World Records for animal with the most names. The vast territory stretches from southern Canada all the way down through the United States, Central and South America to the tip of Chile, and locals in each area have given the same species its own unique name. Hi, my name is Katie Cannon, and this is Coexisting with Urban Predators. As the weather gets warmer here in California, more people are heading out on the trails and into mountain lion territory. This episode is to provide you with information on the elusive cat and provide you with tips on how to stay safe if you find yourself in their territory. To ensure you are provided with the most up-to-date information and safety tips, I was able to speak with an expert on this subject. Please take a listen to my recent interview with Gawain Baptiste, the Coexistence Programs Manager for the Mountain Lion Foundation, which is located in Sacramento, California. My hope is our conversation will keep you safe on your next adventure. All right, if you can, just tell us who you are and a little bit about yourself. Sure, so my name is Gawain Baptiste, and I am the Coexistence Programs Manager for the Mountain Lion Foundation. My background is in agriculture, and what I do for work is help people learn how to coexist safely with wildlife, particularly with mountain lions. That means on their farms and ranches, in their neighborhoods, people with pets, on trails for backpackers, mountain bikers, really anywhere where people are interacting with mountain lions, which if you're on the North American continent, you're on current or former mountain lion habitat. So that really should be all of us. Great. Do you find that people are surprised to know, especially here in Northern California-esque, that there are mountain lions around? I think less and less. I think people still are pretty shocked when they see them in their town. But I think that there is more awareness of how closely they live with us than there has been in the past, because the technology has improved to the point where people can see them more reliably. Mountain lions have always walked through our communities. They've always been coexisting with people. But they're very elusive. They avoid us very effectively. And so what's changed is now the technology has improved, and the affordability has really improved for security cameras, doorbell ring cameras. And so now people are seeing it when a mountain lion walks down their sidewalk. Yes. I can imagine the first time seeing that would be a little daunting. For me, it would be amazing. But I would guess that it could be a little scary. So as far as mountain lions here in Northern California or California in general, is there an estimated number? So there is actually kind of a mountain lion recount going on right now and new numbers coming out. There's a range really between 4,500 and 6,500. We are not able to put a pin on which end is likely of that yet. The science is just still emerging. We're still seeking consensus. A lot of the kind of more recent reports are saying that it's probably the low end. So I can't give you a figure. Mountain lions are pretty notoriously difficult to count because they're so elusive. But there's not very many of them. For reference, there's over 32 million people in California. Well then, yeah, that by comparison is not many at all for sure. Yeah, there's around 10 million people to one mountain lion, possibly more. Oh my gosh. And what is their general role as a predator in our ecosystem here in California? So mountain lions are a species kind of like starfish and tadpoles that are a keystone species. They're an umbrella species. Mountain lions have some of the most studied interactions with other species of any mammal. Mountain lion presence in a landscape is a catalyst for increased biodiversity at every single trophic level from stream aquatic invertebrates to plants to macrophagous like large ungulates like elk and deer. Mountain lion caches, which is mountain lions have this practice that when they hunt and kill a deer, for example, they will bury it under loose grass and twigs and leaves, things like that. Those cache sites are food sources for over 100 different species. The presence of mountain lions in an ecosystem can almost be detected by doing a beetle survey because the beetle biodiversity is so much higher when mountain lions are present. The mountain lions are one of those species where they're elusive, they're hard for us to kind of always get a beat on, but their presence is such a kind of biodiversity force multiplier. Yeah, so I was actually, I had the opportunity to speak to somebody with the North Carolina Wildlife Commission yesterday on coyotes and we discussed the fact that because mountain lions don't live on the East Coast anymore and in North Carolina, the coyote population moved in and it's just so fascinating how one species can change the course of an ecosystem and yeah, it's all connected as we all know, but it's just interesting to see how removing that species would affect this. So how is, you spoke of or touched on it briefly, but as far as having a healthy population of mountain lions here, how is that beneficial to us as humans? I think sometimes we look at ourselves as separate from our ecosystem or the animals, but I would think that having them here is beneficial for us. So there are several really key ways that mountain lion presence is beneficial for humans. One study that's written about in the Cougar Conundrum by Mark Elbrock, which I believe comes out of Ohio State University, showed the effect of mountain lion reintroduction in South Dakota after their absence. What it showed is that the mountain lion reduction of the deer population by a certain percentage, and mountain lions are taking deer that are not attractive to hunters for the most part, had such a profound effect that it actually saved lives. The state of South Dakota saved about $1.2 million per year in the cost of vehicle collision with deer and several lives and hundreds of injuries. Now South Dakota only has about 800,000 people in it, so if you think about that in a state the size of California, where as we said before, there's over 32 million people, and extrapolate that out, mountain lions are... I often talk to people who are afraid of mountain lions because they've just had an encounter, they've just had a depredation, and that's completely reasonable. It's reasonable to be afraid of a large, powerful carnivore. But statistically, mountain lions keep more of us alive than otherwise, by a large stretch. Another real benefit to the presence of mountain lions is chronic wasting disease. As you know, in the eastern United States, chronic wasting disease is a huge problem. Mountain lions don't seem to get it, and they do seem to preferentially target deer that have it. Interesting. The presence of mountain lions can have a really beneficial effect on the health of the deer population. Again, these are not deer that are attractive to hunters. Hunters are not going out there looking for the weakest, sickest deer, but mountain lions are. Yeah. Well, they're easier to catch, I would assume. Another thing that I've studied mountain lions before, just for my own recreational purposes. But one thing that I noticed, too, that I wonder if you guys have noticed here, is the tick-borne illness diagnoses on the east coast are just outrageous because they're more deer and because of them, there are more ticks, and we interact with them more. If you look across the country, where you're getting into mountain lion territory, that seems to drop off. Is that something that you're familiar with as well? Yes. That's something that we talk about a lot. There's emerging science about this, but any time that you have an overpopulation of deer, you're going to lose plant biodiversity. You're going to lose ground nesting birds. You're going to lose a lot of forest ecosystem diversity, but you're also going to have an increase in parasites. Something that I think is important to communicate to most people is that there isn't an ecosystem without predators. Predators exist in every ecosystem. They have to. If we remove macro predators, like mountain lions, what we get are micro predators, like diseases and parasites like ticks. That's what's going to happen. Maybe in your ecosystem, your apex predator is a virus, but there will always be an apex predator. In the case of lion, there's probably a lot of factors going on there. Forest understory burning, which is a really important practice of many different indigenous communities, has been largely banned since colonization happened. The forest understory burning also really helps decrease ticks. The deer overpopulation will very, very much do that too. Again, mountain lions don't seem to get as sick from a lot of the pathogens that really affect deer. That makes sense. They've co-evolved to eat them for millennia. Having mountain lions come in and particularly take out the deer that are the most affected, that are the weakest, has a beneficial effect on the whole rest of the deer population. That affects humans because we share spaces. It also affects domestic livestock. I've spoken to someone who actually just stopped keeping goats entirely because the parasites that were being spread by the local deer population were so damaging that she just wasn't able to keep up on it with the deworming regimen and just decided to stop raising them. That's another thing. A role of predators is kind of a sanitizing effect on the overall population. Mountain lions are doing a lot of the same things that shepherds and ranchers are doing, which is that they're calling for help. Right. Yeah. As the weather gets warmer, we've talked a bit about how beneficial mountain lions are. Of course, people understandably have a fear of potentially encountering one when they're out hiking or potentially, as you said, we're seeing them cross through potentially neighborhoods on rain cameras and that kind of thing. What I'm hoping to do now is just kind of talk about, do we know the likelihood of crossing paths with one? If we do, what's the best course of action? How do we stay safe and how do we make sure that hopefully nothing happens if we were to come across or be in mountain lion territory? Absolutely. So, your odds of seeing a mountain lion at all are very, very slim. A lot of people who are biologists who've worked in the field for years and years have never seen one. I have been lucky enough to get to see them up close and they are imposing. I had studied them for years before I saw one in person and still, I swear, the first thought in my mind when I was about 20 feet from one was, that's a lion, that they are lions on the same, the way that you think of an African lion, it's a large animal, even if they're mostly tail, they're big. So it's completely understandable for that experience to be something that's awe-inspiring, to be something that is fascinating, but also something that is intimidating and is scary and it's incredibly, incredibly unlikely that a mountain lion will attack a person, but it's not impossible. It does happen. It happens because of cases of mistaken identity. It happens because the mountain lions are desperate, are starving, are sick. Those are the kinds of situations where mountain lions can become dangerous to humans. The number one thing that I tell people really is to think about this like, you're going into the woods, a lot of the things that you would do to increase your safety with mountain lions are just going to increase your safety overall. Going with other people is a primary thing. I really encourage everybody to go out and get a marine air horn. Oh, interesting. Okay. They're small. It's a small little gas canister air horn. In my opinion, the ones that you blow into are not as effective as the gas canisters. They usually cost less than $15. You can get them on a marine supply store. You can get them in most outfitters. You can get them on the internet. They're very small. You have to check them after a couple of years because sometimes the canisters lose pressure, but just that tool. I have blown a horn at a mountain lion that was not backing down with yelling and stomping and arm waving. That instantly turned and was gone when a horn was blown at it. They can be very, very effective and they also have the added benefit of making you really easy to find by other people. Oh, yes. Of course. If you're lost or if you're hurt, if something happens to someone in your party and you need to be rescued, or if you have an encounter with wildlife, having the double benefit of being a deterrent itself, but also something that alerts other people to your location is really, really beneficial. I know a lot of folks who carry them because of concerns about wildlife, but who've ended up using them in a case where a loose dog has attacked their dog that was on leash. There are a lot of reasons why these tools can be good to have that are other than mountain lions. Another thing is to consider where you are and consider the time of day. Mountain lions are crepuscular, which means they're most active at dawn and dusk. That doesn't mean that you can't be outside then, but you want to have an increased level of awareness. You do also have people who, if they then see a mountain lion any other time, think that something's wrong. Like, this mountain lion, it was the broad daylight, this mountain lion must be rabid. That's not the case at all. If they're most active in the dusk and dawn, that doesn't mean that's the only time they're around. You can't think that anything's necessarily wrong with a mountain lion that's walking down a trail at 2 p.m. I think there's mixed evidence on lighted dog collars as effectiveness for actually deterring wildlife. I don't have a good study that really proves that, but it does help you know where your dog is at the end of your leash. There are things like that that increase safety, keeping small children close to you, keeping your dog on a leash, making sure people know when and where you're going. All of these basic things, unfortunately, you're much, much more likely to be attacked by a person on a trail. Those precautions are going to be good anyway. If you happen to see a mountain lion, and it happens to be one of those rare cases where a mountain lion actually is dangerous to people, all the advice that we give people on our website about stay together, look big, pick up a small dog or a small child, throw things. I always carry this large, heavy water bottle because, hey, being hydrated is great for you. Also, I'm going to throw that water bottle at an animal that's behaving aggressively, no matter what kind of animal that is. All of that is really important. In the last, the most incredibly unlikely case that there's actually a physical attack, fight. There are cases where people have successfully defended themselves. There is a case of an eight-year-old boy who successfully defended himself from a mountain lion. There's a study based in India. One of the few places in the world where cats actually do hunt people, and where it has been shown that they will hunt people specifically, leopards. There's a case study where a group of young girls, about 12 to 8 years old, were out in tall grass by a river harvesting cane. They were in thick strands of cane, cutting and bundling cane. A leopard came out of the tall grass, grabbed one of the girls, and dragged her off. The rest of those girls went and got their friend back, and successfully beat up this leopard and rescued their friend. There's something that we can do as primates, as great apes, which is called primate mobbing. It's where our social behavior is really, really pretty effective cat deterrent. There needs to be a group of us for that to work. That's another reason why, go with friends. Having each other's back is an unfair advantage that people have over most of the natural world. We're cooperative. If you're going somewhere that's really out in the backcountry, that you know is mountain lion habitat, bring some friends with you. You're most likely to be avoided by them. They'll probably see you, and you won't see them. That increases safety, no matter what the threat is, no matter if someone falls down and hurts themselves. The other side of all of that is, now that we've talked about this really unlikely situation and how to defend yourself, is that just seeing a mountain lion doesn't mean you're having a conflict. Just to see a mountain lion, to see a native animal in its native habitat is not an emergency. Even if it's the middle of the day, even if it's relatively close to a populated area, it's not an emergency. If you've always been there, it's okay to have increased caution around it. Maybe you keep your dogs in more for a couple of days, or only have your kids go outside and supervise. That's just common sense, but it doesn't mean that you need to call 911, alert the media. It's not a cause for panic. Right. Yeah, that's a very good point, something I hadn't thought of. There have been, I think, since the new year, unfortunately, two attacks that I'm aware of by mountain lions, one up in Washington, and then one more recently here in California. Has there been an increase, or is it just by happenstance, do you think? I realize that you may not be able to answer that. Yeah, personally, I don't think that we can say that there's been an increase. They are very rare. We're talking about two incidents that are geographically hundreds of miles apart from each other. They have been very rare, and they're still very rare. In both cases, the lion in Washington was a very small lion. Mistaken identity happens. Bicycles moving through the woods look more quadrupedal. They're moving quickly. That does happen. Very tragic situations do, on very rare occasion, happen. What we do know, and what the science shows, is that the more mountain lion populations are harassed, the more social fragmentation there is, the more likely that we are to have conflicts. Right. The more lethal removals there are of adults, it trends the population younger, and more transient. Sure. That increases conflict. Right. In a county like El Dorado County in California, they have one of the highest rates of lethal removals of mountain lions in California. I think some years they've been number one, and they've been in the top three. I don't think that we can always definitively draw a one-to-one conclusion, but there's a really strong correlation that when adults are removed, the general population trends younger, trends less experienced. Orphaned teenagers may look like they're a fully mature cat, but they're not prepared to be on their own. They will sometimes stay with their mothers for up to two years, and are dependent on them to learn how to hunt, to learn how to live a normal mountain lion life. Right. If that mother gets hit by a car, or gets shot, or dies from rodenticide poisoning, or mange, now you have an orphaned teenager. Personally, it's a reason why I don't spend a lot of time worrying about how people feel emotionally about mountain lions. I think it's okay if people don't like them, or are just afraid of them. That's fine. I'm not on a mission to make everyone love mountain lions. I think that no matter how you feel about mountain lions, it seems very, very clear to me from being as enmeshed in the research as I've been, that we're all safer when their populations are intact, when they are less persecuted, less harassed. There's less conflict with us. That might really seem counterintuitive. People tend to think about these things really arithmetically, like, okay, we have 10 mountain lions, and we shot two, so now we should have eight mountain lions. That's not what happens. Not at all. What happens is you have a territorial vacuum, so maybe in a previous situation, you had a fairly stable small population of mountain lions, now you've got an unstable larger population. I think people don't really understand very much about how they work, and I'll try to relate it to human society. I think that predators are more likely to get into trouble when they don't have a stable family. Right, right. It's the same. Yeah, that makes sense. I just thought of this. I'm new to California, so the wildlife overpasses one I've heard about previously, but I think they're starting to build one on the 101. Are you familiar with that? I am a little bit familiar with it. Do you think that that's something that will help with that fragmentation, and potentially – obviously, we have no idea, can't see the future, but has there been any study or any data that trends towards those are potentially safer in the long run? There's a lot of factors going on here. There's a lot of things moving around, but in general, yeah, we're very, very much in favor of wildlife crossings. Mountain lions either refusing to cross roads at all, and therefore staying isolated in a smaller area and becoming inbred is a huge existential threat to mountain lions, and mountain lions being killed by car crossings is a huge, huge problem, both for them and also for us, because some of the times the mountain lions that get hit and killed are mothers and they leave behind orphans. Wildlife crossings are – they're not something – our highway system was not built with them in mind. Right. The highway system now is really expensive, and they need to be used, so there's some really, really great research going on and good work done on wildlife crossings. We actually had a webinar just recently showing some of the data and some of the work showing the mountain lions will also use under-crossings. They'll move through large culverts, and that those are really, really helpful. I think any way of creating habitat connectivity is really, really important, and that includes under-highways, over-highways, between populated areas, in general having more clustered housing and leaving bands of green space so that wildlife can move through it without having to go across people's lawns. And also, like shelter belts and native plantings across farmland. People often really don't talk about farmland as being as ecologically harmful as it is, but it really is. I mean, you might have thousands of acres with no native plant cover, no prey to speak of. That's going to be an absolutely uncrossable barricade to a mountain lion. Right. If you have a little strip of farmland between wilderness areas, that might mean that your populations are completely cut off. There are programs like the National Resources Conservation Service, which will pay farmers to plant hedgerows and plant perennial strips of native plants, but most crop farmers that I know that used to work in that field wouldn't be thrilled to see a mountain lion strolling down them. Right. Part of it is communication and getting to a place where, okay, we understand that wildlife are using these corridors, that's what they're supposed to be doing, and that that's okay. But generally speaking, any large man-made interruption to the natural landscape, whether it's a housing development or a freeway or a crop field, is a pretty effective barricade for a lion. Right. Yeah. That makes sense. They're a lot less bold than coyotes in that way. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. I hadn't thought of it like that. Huh. Wow. Well, I don't want to take any more of your time. I just want to wrap up with, do you have any final information that we maybe haven't covered? I realize that, gosh, I could talk about this all day long, and I'm sure you could as well, but is there anything else? We kind of talked about how to stay safe and what to do when you encounter one and how great they are for our ecosystem, but is there any other information that you want to share? I would really just say that there's more study needed on a lot of this and that we do our best to be here as a resource for everybody. A lot of what I spend my time doing is helping people keep their lambing barn safe and helping people learn how to coexist. Here in California, we had a bounty system until very recently. Throughout a lot of the Western states, there were bounty systems for mountain lions. The government was essentially paying people to attempt to eradicate the species. Successfully, they were extirpated from much of the Eastern states, but we now have individuals who are traveling several thousand miles. The longest overland travel of any mammal that's ever been recorded was a juvenile mountain lion that was headed east. Young male dispersers, we call them, can go hundreds if not thousands of miles. They are heading east. My point for folks, however they feel about wildlife, however they feel about mountain lions, is that wiping them out has already been tried. It didn't work. It's not currently the United States' policy to try to make them extinct. Our only other option is to coexist with them. When we coexist with them, proactive coexistence is the most effective way of doing that. Proactive coexistence keeps your animals and people safe. It might mean changing some of the ways that we do things. The difference between a lethal removal program, where after a mountain lion kills enough of your lambs, a trapper comes out and kills the mountain lion, not only does that create this revolving door where it might even make your problem worse, but your limbs are still gone. You still had the loss in the first place before the lethal action was taken. If we can set up proactive systems where we prevent the damage in the first place, that's going to be better for the mountain lions because it's going to stabilize their population. It's going to keep us from having that most dangerous demographic, which is an orphaned young adult, from being out there. It's going to prevent it before it happens. We have a lot of information on our website about how to do that. I'm available for consultations, both in person and online. I've even had people have me on video chat, showing me around their barn in other states. We welcome that. The Eastern U.S. is probably, in the next couple of decades, going to have to learn how to live with mountain lions again. My hope is, given all of the benefits that come with them, that by the time that happens, that there's some acceptance of the trade-offs, of the pros and cons of what that's like. We're ready, as an agricultural community, to do what we need to do to mitigate any potential losses that come with that. It's a lot like what we were talking about with hiking. A lot of it's just good practice, anyway. The vast majority of lambs that are lost are not by predators, it's by bad weather, pneumonia, or disease, worms. The kinds of steps that you would put in place to increase safety with wildlife are also just good practice, overall. Getting that mindset in, and just knowing that we're living and working on land that is the native habitat of this animal, and that there's going to be an ongoing management that comes with that. Getting our heads around that, accepting that, and moving into the proactive phase, I think it's really our only option. It's definitely the option that's going to result in the lower number of losses. Because again, given that we don't currently have an extermination policy, the policy after that is a post-depredation lethal removal. No amount of shot mountain lions is going to bring your animals back. Prevent the crisis in the first place, prevent the depredation in the first place. It's the same thing with human recreation, with our presence in their habitat. To go into it with an attitude that we know that they're there, they know that we're there, and we're taking the common sense steps to prevent having an issue in the first place. Yeah, I think that's great. That's super helpful to think of it being proactive instead of reactive. I think that that would help in a lot of ways, in many different things. Thank you so much for your time, I greatly appreciate it. If it's okay with you, when I post this, we'll put up information about the Mountain Lion Foundation and all of that, so that if anybody does come across anything that they're worried about, they can reach out and hopefully support you guys along the way as well with your awesome work. Fantastic. Yeah, I really, really appreciate it. We're here to be a resource for people, and as incredibly rare as they are, when really tragic conflicts happen, they're absolute tragedies. Everybody that I work with is equally upset and sad about them. There's none of us that are ... Really, when it comes down to it, having love for the ecosystem and an intact ecosystem that includes apex predators, that includes people, that includes people being safe as one of the primary goals there. It's not, in my mind, that people will completely leave the wilderness and have no presence. It's not that we'll have no interaction, it's that we want to manage our interactions for the best possible outcome for everybody. Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much. Totally. I want to thank Gowen from the Mountain Lion Foundation for her time and lending her expertise so that we can safely coexist with mountain lions here in California. For more information, please check out the Mountain Lion Foundation website at mountainlion.org. I've also created an infographic that can be viewed, printed, or shared that provides helpful information based on our conversation today on how we can stay safe if we find ourselves in mountain lion habitat. This is a great resource to put in your pack, share with hiking buddies, and a reference before heading out on your next adventure. Thank you for taking the time to listen, and I hope you will check out our other episode of Coexisting with Urban Predators, where we will discuss how we can coexist with coyotes, especially in the southeastern part of the United States, where their numbers continue to grow and sightings of them in neighborhoods become more prevalent. Thank you again for tuning in. Have a great day.