If you’re a young mountain lion, a fresh deer carcass is probably among the better things you could find in a forest. But eating it could mean you end up spending some time in a cage, getting teased by your sibling, and emerging from the experience wearing a new, blingy techno-collar.
On Sept. 30, this is exactly what happened in the Santa Cruz mountains to a young puma now known as 41M. Around 6:30 p.m., the 84-pound cat ventured into a cage trap set by a group of UC Santa Cruz biologists. Lured by the tantalizing scent of dead deer and the recorded calls of dying animals (so tempting), the 14-month-old male tiptoed into the cage and promptly found himself locked inside with a tasty meal. Not far behind? His sibling, another young cat, who sprang atop the cage and started playing with its littermate inside.
The encounter was caught by a trail camera monitoring the cage trap. Soon after, members of the UCSC team came by to check on the cat in the cage; they then sedated him and attached a tracking collar, making him the 41st animal participant in a long-term study known as the UC Santa Cruz Puma Project.
While the team worked, 41M’s sibling stayed nearby, its eyes gleaming in the dark.
Veronica Yovovich keeps an eye on puma 9M after the team put a collar on him in 2011. Scientists stay with the animals until they wake up. (Nadia Drake)
“We could see the eye shine,” said Veronica Yovovich, a graduate student at UCSC. Yovovich is studying the complex interactions between deer, pumas, humans, and vegetation in the Santa Cruz Mountains — an area once covered by nonstop forests, but which in recent decades has been carved into pieces by concrete highways and buildings.
“This was pretty exciting for us,” Yovovich said. “We’re always really cautious about handling these guys, and we want to make sure that whatever we’re doing is safe for the animal. It’s nice to see that when the door shut, [41M] kind of flinched but then was like, ‘Sweet, there’s a half a deer here, and I’m going to eat it.’”
The UCSC team has been studying the local puma population since 2008, estimated to number between 50 and 100 individuals (pumas are also known as cougars, mountain lions, catamounts, painters, and panthers, depending on what part of the country you’re in). The Project’s goal is to understand how these elusive predators interact with and survive in a landscape that’s increasingly shaped by human activities. They want to know where the animals go, how they navigate through a complex network of open spaces and dense, residential areas, and how their lives unfold differently in the presence of civilization.
Led by wildlife ecologist Chris Wilmers, the team uses a variety of tech-savvy collars — and an army of trail cameras — to follow the pumas as they go about their lives. The collars keep track of where the pumas are, and in some cases what the cats are doing, courtesy of accelerometers included in the hardware. Now, the group is busy tracking 14 animals, a task that involves aerial telemetry flights, remote downloading of data, monitoring the trail cams, and heading off into the woods in search of partially eaten puma-meals, and the pumas themselves.
Without the collars, studying the Santa Cruz mountain cougars would be nearly impossible. Mountain lions are among the most stealthy and practiced predators on the planet, slipping through forests and only being spotted occasionally by humans. “Mountain lions are a secretive creatures — they’re professional hiders. That’s how they make their living,” says team member and field biologist Paul Houghtaling in this video shot by KQED, a local TV station. “So it’s no wonder that people rarely see them. They hide, and they don’t want to be seen.”
‘Mountain lions are secretive creatures — they’re professional hiders.’
The shy, nocturnal mountain lions prowl through moonlit forests and ambush prey. As the sun rises, they hide their leftovers and silently spring into trees or under bushes, waiting for the light of day to recede.
But the team doesn’t only keep a record of the mountain lions’ lives — they also keep track of how the animals die. Since the study started, half of the study animals have died; and about half of those cats were killed by humans after messing with livestock, Yovovich said.
In 2011, I had the chance to follow the team for a day and observe how they track their animals, set traps, and, ultimately, collar a new cat. That cat, called 9M, was a 100-pound 2-year-old when he got his collar; a few months later, after striking out in search of new territory, 9M was dead — shot after he messed with someone’s goats. And last week, as 41M got his collar, a cat called 27M was also shot after eating a pet goat.
Last month, California’s governor Jerry Brown signed bill SB132 into law, which requires that nonlethal procedures be used to remove any mountain lion that’s not an immediate threat to public safety. But that only protects animals who wander too far into cities — not those who stick to the fringes. In the Santa Cruz hills, on the border between the forest and town, goats and other unprotected livestock are a tempting target for wild animals — especially the young ones who are still working on developing the hunting skills that will allow them to survive.
When those pumas attack livestock, owners can apply for depredation permits from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. These permits allow them to shoot problem cats — something that’s totally preventable, as predator-proof enclosures do exist, or can be built, Yovovich said.
And yet, it’s a fate that occurs too commonly in areas where humans and pumas coincide.
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