Call of the Wild : Electronic Signals From Collars Track Welfare of Cougar Population

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 last year and M10 had spent most of the previous night trotting across Gypsum and Coal canyons in Orange County. During daylight, the mountain lion had laid up near the Coal Canyon freeway entrance. Now, shortly after sunset, the 100-pound cougar tried to cross the freeway to get to 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. The cougar tried to beat traffic across eight lanes of a high-speed motor way. Mistake.

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

Barely alive, M10 managed to crawl off into the brush. He would recover to live 15 more months, before yet another nighttime attempt at road crossing would end in his death last month.

“His problem (was) just finding enough space to live in,” said mountain lion tracker Duggins Wroe.

The collision between the big cat and car illustrates that the animals are tough. But it also demonstrates how modern times are hemming them in, threatening their population in Orange County and other swiftly developing parts of Southern California.

The scientists know about the demise of M10 and about everything from a cougar’s dining habits to its love life because of an unprecedented study, the Orange County Cooperative Mountain Lion Survey. Directed by wildlife biologist Paul Beier and made possible with equipment from the state Fish and Game Department, the $65,000 study is nearly over after five years.

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

Workers capture cougars, sedate them and outfit them with collars carrying radio transmitters before releasing them back into the wild. (M10 was the 10th male to be fitted with a collar.) Trackers who fly over the Santa Ana Mountains can pick up transmissions and locate the animals.

The animals need vast territory to survive--up to 200 square miles for adult males, and about 50 square miles for females. Cougars are more suited to prowling through brush and roaming mountain ranges than they are to tiptoeing around condominium developments and trying to cross freeways.

A leading cause of death of cougars living in the Santa Ana Mountains is car strikes, a finding that surprised Beier. Before the study, biologists knew that cougars became road kill because police and motorists reported the accidents. But unless a study is conducted, Beier said, “you don’t know about the ones who die in the bushes.” He thought many more cougars would die in their natural habitat.

In remote areas of Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego counties that are not laced with roads and highways, cougars are more likely to die of other causes

As is always the case in nature, experts note, the strongest survive. Younger cats can die from wounds. The oldest cats are less able to hunt for prey and can die of starvation. Resistance to disease may also decrease. Mountain lions that have been shot by authorities after they were determined to be acting strange were found in necropsies to be suffering from disease.

Wildlife biologists say the major threat to cougars in Orange County is a planned housing development in Coal Canyon, east of Anaheim, because it is likely to cut off the corridor the cats need to get from the Santa Ana range up to the Chino Hills.

Now, eight mountain lions in Orange County are wearing the tracking collars. More than 30 have been collared since the program started, but some have died and transmitters have failed. Beier and tracker Wroe estimate there are 10 to 15 adult females and three adult males in the Santa Ana Mountains. It is tougher to determine how many cubs are out there with their mothers--there could be as many as 15.

According to the state Department of Fish and Game’s most recent estimate of the state cougar population, at least 5,100 cats roamed across 80,000 square miles, or half the state, in 1989.

Of those, no one knows how many are in Southern California. But a good rule of thumb is that wherever deer are found, mountain lions are not far away.

About 20% of the state’s deer population is found south of the Tehachapi Mountains, said state Fish and Game wildlife biologist Doug Updike. “Logically, you would have to say that a minority of the state’s lions are probably in Southern California,” he said.

Terry Mansfield, acting chief of the wildlife management division in the state Department of Fish and Game, said cougars are neither threatened nor endangered in California.

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

Hunting mountain lions has been banned in California since Proposition 117 passed in 1990, unless they threaten people or damage property.

Mountain lions and deer are among the wildlife species best able to adapt to human encroachments into their habitat, Updike said.

As evidence of that, Updike points to the fact that 90% of the lions examined by the state Fish and Game Department are in good condition. Still, he said, cougars in some areas are increasingly living closer to people.

What researchers are finding in Orange County, Beier said, is that the animals are staying out of developed areas.

“When you look at a map and see 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,” he said.

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

Laura, now 11, was attacked by a mountain lion while looking for tadpoles in a stream with her mother. She was left partially paralyzed and blind in one eye. Last year, after the family filed a lawsuit against Orange County, a jury awarded her and her family $2 million. The county is appealing the verdict, and a case involving an attack on another child in the park that year is awaiting trial.

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

The county’s manager of regional parks operations, Tim Miller, said that 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 from a precipice by sheriff’s deputies last month.

In fact, in a two-month period ending in mid-September, the U.S. Forest Service recorded 11 encounters between humans and big cats in Angeles National Forest. None resulted in an attack.

Now, thanks in large part to the Orange County study, researchers are learning not only where lions roam but what locations they frequent and how often.

Beier said the study should also inform government agencies about what must be done if the mountain lions are to survive in their areas.

“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.

“I take the approach this population is not doomed, but it requires regional planning to get under way in short order if we’re going to have the mountain lions around,” he said. “Right now we just do everything piecemeal, one little thing at a time, and that’s a recipe for failure.”

Times staff writer Larry Stammer contributed to this story from Los Angeles.