First Cougar Caught and Collared as Study Begins

The first mountain lion has been captured and fitted with a special radio transmitter as part of a two-year study of the animals that live in south Orange County’s rapidly developing foothills.

An 80-pound, female cat was caught Wednesday by professional trackers and a team of hounds in rugged chaparral south of the Ortega Highway and several miles east of San Juan Capistrano.

It took the hunting party nearly nine hours to locate the cougar after picking up its trail in the unpopulated area near Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park. The cat was tranquilized, fitted with a thick, leather collar bearing a radio transmitter, and then released.

The cougar, known for purposes of the study as No. 305, is the first of what wildlife biologists hope will be 10 mountain lions equipped with battery-powered beepers roaming the study area--roughly 70,000 acres of publicly and privately owned land from Rancho Santa Margarita south to the San Clemente backcountry.

On the Increase?

A team of researchers from UC Berkeley hopes to monitor the cougars’ movements and breeding patterns to determine both the size and range of the county’s mountain lion population, which many believe has been increasing and now poses a threat to people in the rapidly developing residential areas in the foothills.

Last year, after a 5-year-old El Toro girl and a 6-year-old Huntington Beach boy were mauled by mountain lions in Caspers Park, and lions were sighted elsewhere in the south county, large portions of the county’s regional parks were closed to children, and regulations imposed on adult hikers.

State Department of Fish and Game biologists hope the study will provide answers to the cougars’ adaptability to the growing presence of man in once-isolated reaches of the county.

“We went for years without man and cougar crossing paths,” said Tom Paulek, a wildlife biologist for the state agency. “That’s now changed . . . but before we do anything, we’ve got to learn more about the big cats and how many are out here.”

The two-year, $154,000-study, which was approved by the Board of Supervisors earlier this month, is the first step.

On Thursday, Paulek, professional tracker Dave Fjelline and several others gathered at dawn at Caspers Park to begin the time-consuming search for fresh cougar tracks. The group split up, fanning out across the study area in trucks and four-wheel-drive vehicles, usually with a spotter perched on the hood staring intently for any sign of the cats--a paw print, a fresh deer carcass or displaced brush.

At this time of year, when most streams have long since dried up, and the late summer sun pushes daytime temperatures in canyon country well into the 80s and 90s, Fjelline monitors the area’s few natural springs, where mountain lions and their prey often gather to drink and cool themselves.

In the back of Fjelline’s truck, seven of his prized hounds waited for the order to join the hunt Thursday. On Wednesday, the dogs had cornered the female mountain lion after a nine-hour hunt, much of it on foot through remote canyons and dusty washes.

But the hounds never got a crack at a cougar Thursday. To conserve the dogs’ energy and speed the search, Fjelline stuck to driving the backcountry trails and roads that criss-cross the county’s interior.

Only once did the tracker come across fresh prints, and it turned out that they belonged to one of two cougars that had been captured and fitted with radio transmitters last November as part of an earlier study.

So about noon, after bouncing along dirt roads for more than five hours, the hunt was called off.

“It’s a game that takes great patience,” said Fjelline, who lives in Sacramento and was hired by the state to coordinate the cougar capture in Orange County.

The bearded, soft-spoken Fjelline said he has been hunting the powerful cats since the mid 1960s, and he rarely goes anywhere without his soiled cap with the patch that reads: “Cougar Hunting An American Heritage.”

Because the big cats can cover dozens of miles in a few days, Fjelline said “luck, a little prayer and good set of eyes” are a tracker’s best weapons.

Wildlife experts say the state’s mountain lion population has increased dramatically in recent years. At the turn of the century, the number was thought to have dwindled to 600, but today biologists estimate that there are more than 5,000.

One reason for the rebound was believed to be a 15-year state moratorium on cougar hunting, a moratorium that ends next month in Northern and Central California. The ban will remain in effect in Southern California south of Ventura County and in the Tehachapi Mountains, as well as in the entire California desert.

Paulek said there are high expectations for the Orange County cougar study because there has never been a satisfactory estimate of their numbers.

The radio-transmitter collars worn by the cats are the key to the study, he said. The transmitters can be tracked from an aircraft or land vehicle and should operate for up to three years, Paulek said. In the early 1970s, some of the first tracking transmitters were powered by solar panels, which failed to send signals at night or when a cougar moved into the shade.

But the collars Fjelline is using cost about $250 and have a special “activity sensor” that emits a faster-paced beep when the transmitter has not moved after three hours. This way, if the cougar has slipped the collar or if the cougar is in trouble or dead, researchers are alerted.