Lion Cub Caught in Mission Viejo : Capture in Lake Parking Lot Follows Several Sightings

A 36-pound male mountain lion cub, seen on the fringes of Mission Viejo several times since Friday night, was captured by county and state wildlife officials Tuesday morning at the northern edge of Lake Mission Viejo.

The area is surrounded by houses and condominiums, yet is only 1 miles from the edge of O’Neill Regional Park, which has been closed for 11 weeks after mountain lions were seen there repeatedly. The park is scheduled to reopen Friday, March 13.

The area where the cub was found also is a little more than five miles northwest of the Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park, where two children were mauled by mountain lions last year.

Guards at the entrance to the lake’s parking lot spotted the cub at about 10 a.m. It was inside the parking lot’s six-foot chain-link fence which runs along Olympiad Road near Marguerite Parkway and has thick shrubbery planted beside it.

As nearby motorists and householders paused to watch, the cub was shot with a tranquilizer dart and turned over to state Department of Fish and Game officials. The cub was taken to the Wildlife Waystation in the San Fernando Valley, where it will be raised until a zoo can be found as a permanent home, state officials said.

Larry Sitton, an associate wildlife biologist for the Department of Fish and Game, said the cub is about 6 months old and “is much too young to survive on its own.” Cubs usually are dependent on their mothers for 18 months, he said.

Sitton said that in a suburban setting, the cub “represents more of a threat to himself than to people.” He could be harassed and attacked by dogs or could panic and run under a moving automobile. At worst, he said, the cub “might scratch or take a nip” at someone who tried to block his escape, but otherwise posed no threat.

Sitton said it usually takes “a rather drastic event” to separate a mother from a cub this young, but it is not uncommon for mother lions to be killed or disabled by accidents in the wild.

He said the cub captured Tuesday appeared to be in good condition and well fed.

State policy is to find some permanent home for captured mountain lions and not to return them to the wilds.

Sitton explained that, particularly in the case of cubs, returning them to the wild would be equivalent to “sentencing them to death. There’s no guarantee that the mother is there any longer.”

In the case of adult lions, releasing them in the wild “would expose us to a great deal of liability (if the lion were to injure someone), and we can’t incur that much responsibility,” Sitton said.

Lt. Bill Donald, a county animal control officer, said his department had received reports of sightings of what probably was the same cub as long ago as last Friday.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department said it had received a report of a mountain lion sighting less than a mile to the east of the capture site at about 8:30 p.m. Monday. The report was of a mountain lion seen on open ground about 240 yards west of the Santa Marguerita Parkway bridge.

An hour later, another report of a mountain lion came in from the 21000 block of Ontur, a street in a housing tract just south of Santa Marguerita Parkway.

Sheriff’s deputies and a sheriff’s helicopter went to both locations but found nothing, a spokesman said.

Sitton said the discovery of the cub would not affect the department’s estimate of mountain lion population in the region--six to eight lions per 100 square miles.

That estimate was made after a 5-year-old El Toro girl and a 6-year-old Huntington Beach boy were mauled by mountain lions in separate attacks last year in the county’s Caspers Park east of San Juan Capistrano.

Caspers Park was closed and has since reopened with new regulations that ban children on hiking trails and campgrounds, require wilderness permits for all visitors, and require adults to be in groups of two or more.

Similar regulations have been adopted by county officials for O’Neill Park when it reopens. A spokesman for the county Environmental Management Agency said that the park is scheduled to reopen next week but that the discovery of the cub nearby “will be a topic of discussion (today)” among park officials.

At about the time the cub was being captured Tuesday, the Orange County Board of Supervisors was unanimously adopting without discussion a resolution opposing mountain lion hunting in Orange County.

The state Fish and Game Department last month proposed new regulations for limited hunting of cougars that could result in killing as many as 210 of the animals statewide, including up to 20 in an area from Los Angeles to the Mexican border, including Orange County.

Times staff writers Gordon Grant and John Needham contributed to this story.