Heads-Up Cougar Stashes Her Cubs, Outfoxes Trackers

No. 305 was in one heck of a predicament.

With yelping hound dogs on her trail and hunters closing in with a tranquilizer gun, the mountain lion wearing radio collar No. 305 seemed hopelessly trapped Thursday in a box canyon deep in Orange County’s rugged backcountry.

But the cougar managed to outsmart her pursuers. Crisscrossing her own trail in a pattern that left the dogs sniffing in circles, the big cat quietly picked her way through the dense underbrush and padded out of the canyon undetected.

And the team of seven county and state trackers returned home empty-handed after an exhausting, seven-hour hunt that had begun in the pre-dawn chill of the Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park near San Juan Capistrano.

“It’s almost like they do this on purpose,” Bruce Buchman, Caspers senior park ranger, said wearily of the elusive mountain lion. “You wonder sometimes just how strong their awareness of us really is.”

Judging from Thursday’s performance, the awareness is extremely acute. The lion not only sneaked her way past men and dogs, but she apparently spirited her three cubs into a safe hiding place as well.

The tracking team, on contract to Orange County as part of a two-year mountain lion study, had wanted to track down and tranquilize the three cubs--which have now grown to about 60 pounds each--so that they could be fitted with radio collars and their movements monitored. They also wanted to check on the collar of the mother, captured and fitted with the radio transmitter last fall.

Accompanying the team were members of the news media, as well as a number of county officials, including 3rd District Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez. All wanted a close look at the animal that has created such a stir in the county in recent years.

After separate, non-fatal attacks in 1986 in Caspers Park on Laura Michele Small and then Justin Mellon, who were at the time 5 and 6 years old respectively, the Board of Supervisors last September allocated $154,000 for a study to learn more about the local mountain lion population.

“We are not going to find out why a lion all of a sudden attacked Laura Small, but we hope to find out enough about their habits and movement patterns so park management can avoid encounters between lions and man,” said Allan Brody, a UC Berkeley biologist who was hired by the county to head the study.

Although much more monitoring needs to be done, Brody said, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn. For example, he said, there do not appear to be as many mountain lions frequenting Caspers Park as previously thought. Earlier estimates were that as many as eight adult lions roamed the 7,500-acre park, but Brody said only four are known to be in the vicinity.

Before Brody began the study in April, county and state rangers had tracked down and tranquilized four adult, female mountain lions--including No. 305--to fit them with radio collars. No. 305 and another cat were collared last fall. Two others were fitted during 1986.

Since the batteries for the tiny half-watt radios are good for only three years, the rangers have had to try to recapture the lions that were fitted in 1986, Brody said.

They were successful in trapping one last month. The other, known as No. 335, has proved far more elusive and was another target in Thursday’s hunt. Trappers also want to tag a yearling mountain lion--the offspring of one of the other adults in the area.

At the outset Thursday, Brody expressed grave doubts about whether No. 335 could be tracked down the same day. That cat, according to radio transmissions, spends most of her time wandering through inaccessible terrain in her 60-square-mile hunting range that stretches from the high peaks of the Santa Ana Mountains to Camp Pendleton in San Diego County.

The mountain lions cover a large territory while constantly searching for prey. A big cat typically will have to bring down one deer every other day to sustain itself. And a female cat would have to kill even more if she had cubs to care for, Brody said.

But Brody decided to at least give No. 335 a try Thursday, since he had the assistance of state Department of Fish and Game trackers Dave Fjelline and Cliff Wylie and their team of five dogs. Brody’s own assistant, Jeff Brent, also had a team of three dogs.

The dogs are effective only in the morning, when the lion scent is still fresh in the cool dampness, Brody said. For that reason, the tracking team necessarily started early, at 5 a.m., in search of both fresh tracks and radio signals that would indicate whether one of the lions was within range.

Fjelline took off in one truck to scour local dirt roads for tracks. Wylie and Brent took another truck with their dogs. Brody and Buchman set out in the third truck to check for radio signals.

The hunt actually was concentrated on the private property of Rancho Mission Viejo, a sprawling cattle ranch that leases land to Ford Aerospace and TRW as test sites. The ranch, with its proliferation of canyons filled with live oak and sycamore trees and chaparral, is considered ideal mountain lion habitat.

It is a favorite haunt of No. 305. Using a radio receiver with a hand-held antenna, Brody picked up the tell-tale beeps from No. 305’s collar while standing on a high ridge blanketed in the dense, early-morning fog.

Although he could see nothing, Brody managed to pinpoint the lion’s location by driving further along the road and measuring the distance of the beeps through a process known as radio telemetry. Brody explained that the radio transmissions can be received only by line of sight to the receiver.

The other trackers, having failed to turn up more than fleeting transmissions from No. 335 by late morning, all converged on the canyon where Brody had located the mother cougar.

Excitement was so contagious that even the dogs seemed to sense it, yapping and howling as soon as they were let loose to sniff around a cattle trough where Fjelline had found tracks of the mother and her three cubs.

“It’s starting-gate time, Churchill Downs,” joked Fjelline, who is from rural Placer County in Northern California.

Men armed with radio receivers ringed the canyon while some of the other trackers set out on foot with three of the strongest dogs.

An hour of tedium ensued. The dogs could be heard howling occasionally as they followed a scent. Men on the canyon ridges listened to their radio receivers, which recorded beeps showing the mother mountain lion roaming from one side of the canyon to the other.

At one point, ranger Buchman armed himself with a staff after Brody announced that radio signals showed No. 305 coming straight at his group, assembled at the southern end of the canyon. But the big cat did not appear.

The sound of artillery shells thundering in the distance from nearby Camp Pendleton gave the scene a combat atmosphere, as did U.S. Marine helicopters flying overhead.

But this day’s battle was won by the mountain lion. And after more than two hours in the sometimes-broiling sun, the trackers’ only certainty was that they will have to go through all this work again.

Afterwards, Buchman paid the cougars a grudging compliment.

“To have to live out here and kill a deer every other day, you gotta tip your hats to these cats,” he said.