Suburbs Are Muffling the Call of the Wild Cat

The lean, mean killing machine known as M10 had a problem: how to cross the Riverside Freeway.

It was 9 p.m. on a warm May evening and M10 had spent most of the previous night trotting across Gypsum and Coal Canyons. During daylight the mountain lion laid up near the Coal Canyon freeway entrance. Now, soon after sunset, the 100-pound cougar tried to get from the south side of the freeway to the north side, en route to the Chino Hills.

An adult mountain lion’s eyes are about level with a car’s headlights. The lights confuse the animal, making it blink, turn away, miss something it might otherwise have seen. This time the cougar missed the underpass beneath the freeway. Instead, it tried to beat traffic across eight lanes of high-speed motor way. Mistake.

The thud sent M10 flying. It broke the grill and headlights of the car and knocked off the license plate. Motorists stopped to look and took pictures of the cougar lying on its side.

Yet M10 managed to crawl off into the brush, barely alive.

“He seems to be doing fine now,” mountain lion tracker Duggins Wroe said not long ago. “His problem is just finding enough space to live in.”

The car-cat collision shows that the animals are tough. But it also demonstrates how modern times are hemming them in, possibly dooming them in Orange County.

The animals need immense amounts of territory to survive--up to 200 square miles for adult males, and maybe 50 square miles for females. And they’re more suited to prowling through brush and roaming mountain ranges than they are to tiptoeing around condominium developments and trying to cross freeways.

Indeed, a leading cause of death of the cougars patrolling the Santa Ana Mountains is car strikes--on Ortega Highway, Santiago Canyon Road, Camp Pendleton. Wildlife biologists say the latest major threat is a planned housing development in Coal Canyon, east of Anaheim, because it’s likely to cut off the corridor the cats need to get from the Santa Ana range up to the Chino Hills, north of the freeway.

Without that corridor, and with continuing encroachment on their lands, “we’ll probably lose these mountain lions in 20 or 30 years,” said Paul Beier, wildlife biologist. The number left “will be zero.”

The reason the scientists know about the corridor, the reason they know what happened to M10, the reason they know about everything from the cougars’ dining habits to their love lives, is an unprecedented study, directed by Beier, that’s nearing its end after five years.

Begun after mountain lions mauled two children in separate attacks in Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park near San Juan Capistrano in 1986, the study ends next February.

It has involved capturing cougars, sedating them and draping their necks with collars carrying radio transmitters before releasing them back into the wild. (M10 was the 10th male to be fitted with a collar.) It has involved flying over the mountain range to pick up the transmissions, so a tracker knows where the animals are. It has involved trucking across undeveloped Orange County--there’s a surprising lot of it left--following the cougars night and day. It has kept Duggins Wroe and his hound dogs busy for the last four years.

Wroe, 34, has tracked grizzly bears in Canada and mountain lions in the Sierra Nevada. He holds a degree from the University of Montana, gets nervous thinking of living in a city, and not only sees things on a dusty trail no one else would spot, but knows what they mean.

Wroe is a tracker for Beier in what is formally known as the Orange County Cooperative Mountain Lion Survey. Mustachioed, usually wearing his long hair in a ponytail, he lives on the Starr Ranch wildlife preserve in back of Rancho Santa Margarita and Dove Canyon; he spends many of his days driving and walking the hills and trails of south and east Orange County.

Motoring along at 5 m.p.h. and leaning out the open door of his 1982 Toyota truck, Wroe studies the ground. Then he stops and gets out. “See that?” he says. Yeah, dirt. With no sign of impatience, he draws a circle around what he has seen in the dirt. Whoa! What’s this? Paw prints!

Wroe whips out a ruler and deduces from the size of the foot pads that a female adult mountain lion has passed this way, within the last 24 hours.

When he started working on the project, three females were using the area around Starr Ranch, Wroe says. One was killed crossing Ortega Highway, the other two by some kind of cougar-related diseases.

Wroe says that while an adult male will run another adult male off its territory--or kill him--females will share some part of their ranges “as long as the food lasts.” And with deer the animals’ favorite food and still easy to spot in Caspers park, the eating is pretty good for the cougars.

Wroe is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to mountain lions. Size? About eight feet from head to tail. Weight? Eighty to 100 pounds for a female, 120 to 160 pounds for a male. Speed? Well, real fast for short distances, but without the large lung capacity needed for long runs. Prey? From a skunk to a deer in Orange County, up to an elk elsewhere.

A mountain lion will kill a deer about every 10 days to get enough food to keep going. A quick ambush from behind, a jump on the back and the canine teeth more than an inch long rip into the neck. A female with cubs generally has to kill a deer once every three days to keep itself and the brood going. Wroe remembers seeing one female who had broken a leg a week and a half earlier drag itself out of a sickbed in the bush and kill a deer so it could feed its cubs.

But they can get along for a while without the big meals. “We had one just sit under I-5 for a week and basically just eat possum,” Wroe recalled. And M10 lay in the brush off the Riverside Freeway for a week after being hit, living on who knows what until it started moving half a mile one night, a mile the next. Two weeks after the accident, the cougar killed a skunk and spent the rest of the night eating all of it except a few tufts of fur. Another two weeks and M10 was roaming and killing bigger animals again.

Wroe gets his information on the cougar’s eating habits not from the radio transmissions but by painstakingly walking the trail several times a week, picking up cougar droppings--known as scat--and analyzing them to determine which unfortunate animal lower in the food chain was the victim this time.

He prepares a trail by driving along a dirt road where a cougar has signaled its presence by the collar transmitter. He sweeps the ground, so when the tracks show up they’ll be easy to see. The ideal terrain for tracking cougars is snow, because the scent lasts longer for the dogs, but this after all is Orange County.

A flyover in the state Fish and Game Department two-engine Cessna based at Long Beach airport will also pick up the transmissions. Then Wroe and tracker David Choate sometimes single out one mountain lion; Choate follows it in a truck for 12 to 16 hours through the night, taking fixes every 15 minutes to determine roughly where the animal went.

One recent morning after a flyover and an all-night surveillance by Choate, Wroe opened the spacious kennel where he keeps his five hounds and commanded them to “load up.” The dogs hopped in the camper shell of the four-wheel-drive truck and settled down for the ride.

Currently, eight of the mountain lions are wearing working collars. More than 30 have been collared since the program started, but some have died and others’ transmitters have failed. In all, Beier and Wroe estimate there are now 10 to 15 adult females and three adult males in the Santa Ana mountains. It’s tougher to determine how many cubs are out there with their mothers; maybe 10 to 15.

Choate’s surveillance indicated that by morning F19 (“F” for female, the 19th female to be collared since the program began) was somewhere on the 2,700 acres of the Capistrano Test Facility of TRW Inc., where research for the so-called “Star Wars” space defense program is conducted. The facility, largely undeveloped, borders Rancho Mission Viejo and Camp Pendleton.

Wroe checked with the gate guards, but no one had seen any mountain lions recently. Not surprising. Wildlife experts’ favorite word for cougars is “elusive.”

“You’re lucky to tree 5 to 10% of the cats you track,” Wroe said as he spent more than half an hour searching for tracks on dirt trails.

Finally he found a print. And another. Clearly, the cougar had traveled hundreds of yards from where Choate thought it had gone, showing the limitations of radio telemetry. But the prints were good enough reason to let slip the dogs, and they come bounding out of the homemade mobile carriers in the back of the pickup.

The hounds split up, ran madly, stopped, sniffed. They plowed through the brush, Wroe following and ignoring brambles. After more than half an hour, he figured from the barking of the dogs that they were getting close. But because he needed the truck as backup, Wroe started trudging back toward the road.

He left behind him an amazing silence. The steady thudding of artillery at Camp Pendleton had stopped. There were no cars, no music, not even a songbird. Just an incredible stillness on hillsides bereft of development.

Suddenly there was a thrashing in nearby brush. And then, visible only for seconds, a mountain lion appeared, in profile. It walked slowly from left to right. The animal was beautiful. Then it was gone.

Wroe’s truck came bouncing down a trail. “Did you see one?” he asked with a grin, setting off to a site where the hounds were baying in a chorus that Wroe said meant they had the big cat up a tree.

Sure enough, farther down the trail, the mountain lion known as F19 lay draped across the branch of a sycamore 20 feet off the ground. Cougars are born with spots but lose them at age six months or so, turning to a light butterscotch color. The cat was well camouflaged, difficult to spot even when you knew there had to be one somewhere in that tree. It appeared amazingly placid amid the maelstrom of yelping hounds.

Wroe moved in to leash the dogs. Before he could grab even one, F19 leaped. It was a majestic jump, straight out for maybe 15 feet, followed by a glide to the ground. Then the animal was off again, hauling withers through the underbrush, the hounds in pursuit.

A couple hundred yards farther along and the mountain lion was treed once more. This time it looked more ragged, sitting on a branch and looking down at the dogs. Mouth open, tongue hanging out, it panted. Wroe leashed the dogs, looked up at the animal then and walked away.

His goals this day were to find the cat and make sure it looked OK. But on other days Wroe depends on getting a mountain lion treed or caught in a snare so he and others can put a collar on it, tattoo its ear for identification and give it a closer look.

Wroe said that most cougars are caught with leg snares. “It’s efficient, humane,” he said. When he gets one in a snare, or treed, he can use a drug gun or a long ski pole with a syringe on it. Two other people approach the cat and distract it, while Wroe hits it with the tranquilizer. “It’s a very, very nice technique, this leg snare.” He’s used them on bears for several years too. “It’s humane and effective, in the hands of a skilled trapper.”

Wroe said that after a long pursuit with the dogs, he’ll sometimes call it off, “because the cat’s going to be stressed, major, and the body temperature will be elevated. . . . It’s not worth it to me to lose the cat.”

Wroe, Choate and other researchers, paid and volunteer, relay their information to Beier, who compiles monthly briefs and more extensive quarterly reports with the county.

A Ph.D in wildlife biology from UC Berkeley, Beier is now at Northern Arizona University. He said that “in terms of the interface between wild animals and urban areas, this is a pretty unique study.”

He said one of the biggest surprises to him was how many of the animals are killed by cars. Before the study, biologists knew that cougars became road kill because police and motorists reported the accidents. But without a study, “You don’t know about the ones who die in the bushes,” which Beier thought would be far more numerous.

Another finding from the study is that the Santa Ana Mountain cougars can reach only one other group of mountain lions for breeding, near Temecula. If they get cut off--and development threatens to cut off the corridor to Temecula, Beier said--inbreeding will severely weaken the genetic pool of the animals.

“I guess the other main surprise to me is how well the animals stay out of developed areas,” Beier added. Although there have been reports of cougars wandering across back yards, in many cases the encroaching animals turn out to be bobcats or other creatures--even house cats, he said.

“When you look at a map and seen how much habitat they require, and how much habitat, even in just the last four years, has been lost--basically, when the humans move in, they move out--I’m surprised they are as well behaved as they are,” Beier said.

Investigators have found that cougars live with their mothers until age 12 to 18 months, when they move to ranges of their own.

“They have 17 cities they can run into and they don’t,” Beier said. “They don’t know right from left,” yet they are able to avoid populated areas and “explore the entire mountain range, which to me is pretty surprising.”

Beier testified last year at the trial of the 1986 Caspers Park mauling of Laura Small that a study he did found only 53 cougar attacks on humans in the past 100 years in the United States and Canada. He said you’re more likely to be killed by a black widow spider, rattlesnake or lightning than by a mountain lion.

Laura Small, now 11, was attacked by a mountain lion while looking for tadpoles in a stream with her mother. She was partially paralyzed and blinded in one eye by the cat. Last year a jury awarded her and her family $2 million. The county is appealing the verdict, and a case involving a second attack on another child in the park that year is still awaiting trial.

After the verdict, the county closed Caspers park to minors and officials said there are no plans to lift that ban anytime soon.

The county’s manager of regional parks operations, Tim Miller, said the county is spending about $65,000 a year to study the cougars, with the state Fish and Game Department providing extra equipment such as collars, trucks and aircraft for flyovers.

Miller said in recent weeks his counterparts in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties have “reported a lot of sightings” and have asked him how to notify the public. Caspers park now has signs throughout the facility warning of cougar sightings and advising caution.

One sighting in Los Angeles County came in the San Gabriel Mountains, where two hikers cornered by a mountain lion had to be rescued by sheriff’s deputies last month.

Terry Mansfield, acting chief of the wildlife management division in the state Department of Fish and Game, called the Orange County study “a unique project and a very valuable one.”

“One thing is documenting what lions really do” in urban areas, Mansfield said. “In recent years, as humans invade lion habitat . . . we sometimes find lions that are in trouble, but we don’t know how old they are, or where they received their injuries.” Now researchers are learning where lions are born; what locations they frequent and how often; what activities are done only by young males or young females; whether a lion born in the area takes up its mother’s home range or goes elsewhere.

Beier said the study should also let government agencies know what must be done if they want the mountain lions to survive in their areas.

He testified at a public hearing that the Hon Development Co.’s plans to build 1,550 homes on 650 acres in Coal Canyon, east of Anaheim and smack dab across the cougar corridor, can mean death for the cougars. The company contended the project would have little impact on the animals and the Anaheim City Council approved the project’s environmental impact report last March.

Beier said a paper he expects to publish next year developed a mathematical model applied particularly to the Santa Ana Mountains cougars, detailing how much habitat and connections between cougar populations are required for their survival.

“We’ve given real numbers in it for people to deal with, so people can plan land use so we can keep this population here,” Beier said. “The basic conclusion is that we probably won’t” do the planning. “We’ll probably lose these mountain lions in 20 or 30 years. (The remaining number) will be zero. . . . I take the approach this population is not doomed, but it requires regional planning to get underway in short order if we’re going to have the mountain lions around. Right now we just do everything piecemeal, one little thing at a time, and that’s a recipe for failure.”

Mansfield stressed that cougars are neither endangered nor threatened in California, whatever their status in Orange County.

“The public feels because they don’t see them daily, they’re on the brink of extinction,” Mansfield said. Actually, “they’re a heck of a lot more common in some areas of state.”

His department’s most recent estimate of the state cougar population, in 1989, was at least 5,100, scattered across 80,000 square miles, or half the state. Hunting mountain lions has been banned in California since Proposition 117 passed in 1990, unless they threaten people or damage property.

Mansfield said the purpose of the county study was “not to shape development in southern Orange County, but to get objective data” and let the county “make decision on that.” Whether the information is used to manage property differently, to temper the pace of development in the county, is up to others, he said.

“We’re biologists, not lawyers or land use decision makers.”

Wroe too, though he obviously loves the cats, stresses that he’s there to see what they’re up to, not to save them from becoming road kill or victims of each other.

“Cougars are fun to work with. . . . They’re always looking to kill something. They’re highly skilled predators. . . . Down here it’s amazing they can spend all this time in close proximity to humans and not get in trouble that often.”

Three and a half weeks ago, on a warm summer night, M10 loped across scrub not far from a firehouse on Santiago Canyon Road, near Irvine Lake. The animal that got battered trying to cross Riverside Freeway 16 months earlier attempted to cross Santiago Canyon Road about 11 p.m. It was a bigger mistake than the first one. It was a fatal mistake.

“I went over and picked him up” from a refrigerator where animal control officials had stored the body, Wroe said. “He was a really nice-looking tom--137 pounds, healthy, excellent condition, as good as it gets, a really nice-looking cat.”

The driver who hit M10 called animal control workers to report the accident, anonymously, Wroe said. “What killed him was not just the broken bones--we’d seen him survive those before. Once I cut him open, it was a ruptured spleen that did him in; the blood loss just killed him.”

Wroe saved some of the bones to compare them with those of other dead cougars; he sent blood and tissue samples off for analysis; he buried the rest of M10 behind his house on Starr Ranch.