No Easy Solution to Cougar Problems in County Parks

Gil Ferguson has learned his lesson where mountain lions are concerned.

After two attacks on small children in Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park last year, Assemblyman Ferguson (R-Newport Beach) suggested that the solution was to track down the animals and kill them. That statement, he says, has prompted more response from the public than he has received as a member of the Legislature on any other issue.

“I have felt the sting of all those folks out there . . . who were very concerned about wildlife--and who offer the opinion that the animals were here before the people and we should stay out of their way,” said Ferguson, whose district includes Caspers Park.

Park Restrictions Imposed

There is no easy solution. Ten months after the mauling of a 5-year-old El Toro girl and two weeks after the most recent closure of another county park, the dilemma of what to do about mountain lions in Orange County wilderness areas is as formidable as ever, according to county officials. And no long-term answer is expected for at least two years.

For the short term, the county has imposed restrictions on visitors to Caspers Park and is in the process of formulating similar rules for O’Neill Regional Park in Trabuco Canyon, which was closed Dec. 26 after mountain lion tracks were found in a public picnic area. But everyone seems to agree that a long-term strategy is needed.

“It’s not enjoyable to open and close” parks with each sighting of a mountain lion, said Supervisor Bruce Nestande, whose district includes O’Neill Park. But “for a lot of different reasons, because of lawsuit potential and other reasons, you’ve got to react in some way. . . . We have in place a good inquiry that is going to let us make a long-term policy. Until then we’ll have to do some reacting.”

The inquiry to which Nestande referred is a study by the National Audubon Society of the mountain lion population in southern Orange County that will take at least two years to complete and has not yet begun. Lions will be captured, and radio transmitters will be attached to them so they can be tracked in an effort to learn how many there are and how far they range. The county has agreed to pay one-third of the $72,000 cost of the study.

A smaller-scale study is being conducted by state Fish and Game Department officials, who in November said at least six cougars were roaming wilderness areas in and around Caspers Park.

‘A Good Policy in Place’

Part of the dilemma is the question of how much responsibility the county, or any government agency, should have for the safety of visitors to an acknowledged wilderness area.

“How much can you protect the public from themselves?” asked Milton Fletcher, who has worked in the Santa Fe-based southwest regional headquarters of the National Park Service for 13 years. “Should we tell everybody that they ought to take a look at night and be sure they’ve picked the ticks off themselves because they might get Rocky Mountain spotted tick fever? Where do you end? Should you say, ‘Look out for falling rocks?’ ”

“I think we have a good policy in place right now,” said Nestande. “You cannot act erratically and go out and make a firm policy on this issue until we go through our. . . study. . . .

“I think what you’re talking about is a solution for the next 20 to 50 years, not just the next six months. You have to understand these animals, their numbers, their habitat, where they belong.”

Ferguson said he still believes the problem would be “at least lessened significantly” by allowing limited hunting of the mountain lions, not necessarily in Caspers but in more remote areas, so that animals competing with one another for food and turf are not forced into an urban area.

But on the specific Caspers problem, Ferguson said that, in view of the uproar his earlier comments provoked, he is leaving the solution to state Fish and Game Department and county officials.

“I now can see the problem the county politicians are having in trying to solve a real problem,” Ferguson said. “The people who love animals and think of animal rights above human rights are very outspoken and very emotional.

“I can certainly understand the difficulties of making a decision. It’s a very political thing.”

Caspers, seven miles east of San Juan Capistrano, is also in the district of Orange County Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, who has been a strong campaigner for more parks in the county and a backer of the new restrictions on visitors to Caspers, at least temporarily.

Before the second attack at Caspers last year, Riley said county officials always knew access would have to be restricted in some areas of the park “if wildlife were to be conserved and protected.” He said the new regulations were needed “both for the protection of people and for the conservation of wildlife.”

Wild Lands Not Risk-Free

Riley’s chief aide, Peter Herman, said last week that “the issue is how do the public and all aspects of wildlife, including trees . . . how are they going to get along in a harmonious way in a recreational area? It’s not easy for an urban county to work out a living relationship with wild lands and wildlife.”

“You can’t have wildlife and wild lands and a risk-free environment,” Herman said. “So there is a risk taken in visiting these lands. But we all conclude it’s a valuable life experience to get outdoors occasionally, so we provide these lands, enthusiastically.”

It was on March 23, 1986, that 5-year-old Laura Michele Small of El Toro was mauled by a mountain lion at Caspers. The girl, who had been hiking in the park with her parents and brother, was partly paralyzed and blinded in one eye. A young male lion believed to be the one that attacked her was treed by hunting dogs, shot and killed the next day. Caspers was closed for three weeks until April 14.

In July, hiking trails were closed while hunters trapped a lioness and a cub and removed them from the park.

Last Oct. 19, 6-year-old Justin Mellon of Huntington Beach was mauled by a cougar in Caspers Park, and the park again was closed, this time until Jan. 2.

When it reopened, children were limited to the picnic area near the entrance and adults wanting to go beyond that area were required to obtain wilderness-use permits spelling out dangers in the park and to use nature trails and campgrounds only in groups of two or more.

But one week before Caspers Park was scheduled to reopen, neighboring O’Neill was closed after numerous mountain lion tracks were found in areas heavily used by visitors and after one lion was seen by a camper. County officials said they expect to reopen the popular park soon, but probably with restrictions similar to those in effect at Caspers.

Signs Warn of Danger

Signs have been posted at the 7,500-acre Caspers Park, with red letters on white backgrounds, stating: “Warning, Mountain Lion Country, A Risk. There are mountain lions in this park. They are unpredictable and dangerous. Minors have been attacked without warning.”

By contrast, a $28-million lawsuit filed in Orange County Superior Court in October by Richard J. Staskus, a San Jose attorney representing the Small family, contends that visitors to the park at the time of the attack on Laura Small were warned only of dangers from rattlesnakes and poison oak, which was described as “the most dangerous form of wildlife found in the park.”

The difficulty of educating people to the dangers of the wilds exists across the country, said John Dennis, an associate senior scientist with the National Park Service.

“The real problem we see as a nation is so many people grow up in cities and have no idea of the nature of animals,” Dennis said. “People think milk comes from milk cartons, they have no idea how it got there. . . . They have no idea how to act in wild country.”

As a result, people who try to pet bison or deer or have their pictures taken with the animals often get trampled or gored, Dennis said. The park service tries to let people know that “a very peaceful, somnolent creature can become very dangerous very quickly, especially when being pushed by a human.”

Sections of national parks may be closed to hikers and campers for days, weeks or longer when large numbers of bears are spotted, Dennis said. Visitors are told that “bears are not the friendly creatures the teddy bear syndrome might make them think.”

The attack on Laura Small was said by some wildlife authorities in the state to be the first fully documented attack on a human by a cougar in California in recent years, but such attacks are common in British Columbia.

“We have one or two attacks every year” in the Canadian province, said Wally Macgregor, big game specialist for the British Columbian government.

In most cases, the attacks take place in remote areas, Macgregor said. But 1 1/2 years ago, a girl in a Girl Scout camp 20 minutes from downtown Victoria was mauled.

“We have cougars that occasionally come right through town, about every other year,” Macgregor said.

Odds of Attack Very Small

The government keeps the parks open even when attacks occur, Macgregor said, although it will try to trap and relocate, or kill the attacking animal.

“I think it’s just accepted that if you’re going to enjoy the outdoors, this is one of the very, very small risks,” Macgregor said. “Compared to being hit by a car or something like that, the odds (of a mountain lion attack) are very small.”

The National Park Service’s Fletcher, who has a doctorate in animal ecology, said the only mountain lion attack on a human in a national park in the six-state region stretching from Louisiana to eastern Arizona occurred 1 1/2 years ago in Big Bend National Park in southern Texas.

“We never closed the park,” Fletcher said, because researchers studying mountain lions in the area quickly determined that the culprit was an outsider that wandered into the area. Within 24 hours, the animal had been tracked down and killed.

The park service has no signs warning of mountain lions in the 700,000-acre park, where broad expanses of desert yield to mountains, “because again in dozens of years of experience we’ve had running those parks we’ve never had incidents except this one,” Fletcher said.

Last week at Caspers, the new rules were a disappointment for Carolyn Towns, 29, of San Juan Capistrano, who with her mother, Betty, and her 3 1/2-year-old son, Jason, visited the park Friday afternoon.

“I was saying in the car coming over how sad it is not to be able to camp overnight here any more,” Carolyn Towns said. Betty said the family began visiting the park in 1983, coming on day-trips scores of times and staying overnight as many as 30 nights a year in the family recreational vehicle.

Only adults in parties of two or more can use the campground now, Betty Towns said, bringing hardship not only to weekend family campers but to many people who are homeless by choice or calamity and found it cheap to pay $6 for an overnight stay in the campground.

“It used to be their way of life,” Betty Towns said. “You’d see them camping here for as long as they were allowed, then you’d see them in other parks. Then they’d be back here.”

As she watched her son dash from the swings to the climbing pole to the slide, Carolyn Towns said that before the mountain lion attack she had ventured far from the Ortega Highway park entrance, back across creeks and onto the nature trails.

“We always keep an eye on Jason when we’re here,” she said. “We walked all along the creek and the trails where the little girl was attacked. Jason was always in my arms. It was beautiful.”