Notes about your surroundings.

Cougar Watch--Paul Beier will be heading back into the Chino Hills in the coming weeks on the trail of the mountain lion. Beier, head of the Orange County Cooperative Mountain Lion Study, is hoping to determine whether cougars make use of the 50 square miles of rolling hills and steep canyons.

“The area should be able to support two adult females,” Beier said. An earlier survey was inconclusive, but a puma was reported in Chino Hills State Park last summer.

Chino Hills is not large enough to support a self-contained population, but could provide a valuable hunting area for cougars. To be valuable, of course, the area would have to retain some kind of natural connecting corridor to the population of lions that roam the Santa Ana Mountains (estimated at about 25 females, three to four males and an unknown number of cubs).

In an August report, Beier recommended leaving Coal Canyon open as a corridor for cougars and other mammals. “It’s real crucial to allow some way for a male to move in there from time to time. . . . If we want to have cougars in the Chino Hills, we’ve got to leave this corridor,” Beier said.

“Even if we don’t have cougars in there now, as long as we keep a corridor in there we’ll get them back.”

The Chino Hills survey is part of a study of areas peripheral to the Santa Ana Mountains. The San Joaquin Hills near Laguna Beach, which had mountain lions as recently as three years ago, was found to have none remaining. With the amount of development now cutting the hills off from the Santa Ana Mountains, it is unlikely the area will again attract cougars.

Beier is gathering the data for a computer model of the Santa Ana Mountains cougar population that he hopes to complete this winter. The goal, he said, is to “see if this population will stay around for 50 years.” And while it’s too early to make conclusions, Beier did say, “If we develop all our private land, I’d say it’s extremely bleak.”