State Cougar Population Is Shrinking, Experts Say

Smooth and silent, mountain lions prowl at twilight along hundreds of miles of Sierra foothills, seldom glimpsed by a swelling population of residents who view the majestic cats with equal measures of delight and fear.

“I love walking, but I pay attention to what I’m doing. I’m not going to walk early in the morning. You have to respect their space. It’s like living in the city--you wouldn’t walk in a bad location,” said Nancy Gerbault, who lives in the forests above Sutter Creek, a Gold Rush town about 40 miles east of Sacramento.

Long the stuff of Western lore, California’s mountain lions--also known as cougars, pumas, panthers and catamounts--are a species in transition. After sharp growth from the 1970s to the early ‘90s, their numbers are showing a decline, state and private experts say.

“Lion activity is going down. We are seeing a general decline, but that’s not to suggest that they are endangered at all,” said Steve Torres, a mountain lion expert with the state Fish and Game Department.

Experts believe the population grew too big for the available habitat to sustain and is now falling to a more natural level.

Adult males are largely territorial and will fight to the death over turf. As the protected lion population increased, the cats fought each other for ground.

“It’s called ‘compensatory mortality.’ Each lion has its own territory, and if another lion comes into that territory, the weaker lion must either leave immediately or be killed,” said Lynn Sadler, executive director of the Mountain Lion Foundation, a 26,000-member wildlife preservation and research group.

“The problem is, there are too few studies to know how all this works, so it’s just a guess. It’s sort of a ‘rubber band’ effect--the population of lions rose to more than the habitat could sustain, and now the decline we see may just be a settling in,” Sadler said.

Numbers Peaked in ‘94, ’95

Experts aren’t sure how many mountain lions there are in California. The best estimate from the state Fish and Game Department is 4,000 to 6,000 animals, with the heaviest populations on both slopes of the Sierra, in the forests of the northwest coast and in the rolling hills of the central coast. An adult male may roam over 100 square miles.

The population peaked in 1994 and 1995, Torres said.

“We were seeing heavy impacts on small prey, we were seeing attacks on people, depredation of livestock,” he said.

About 300 incidents were reported and verified in a 12-month period, about double the number of an average year.

The attacks included the fatal mauling of jogger Barbara Shoener, 40, who was killed in 1994 during her morning run near Auburn Lake Trails 40 miles east of Sacramento.

Such attacks seldom occur-- about a dozen people have been killed by cougars in the United States and Canada during the last century--but they capture media attention and fuel fears of the lithe cats, who are sight predators and attack from ambush. An adult male may weigh 160 pounds and measure eight feet from nose to tail; the female is smaller.

“It’s like airplane crashes. They are rare but they are so high-profile that anytime anything happens they get written about and everybody sees it. It’s the same with this, especially when something happens in a populated area,” said state Fish and Game spokesman Steve Martarano.

Once hunted for $50 to $100 bounties, cougars have been shielded from hunting since 1972-- first by a series of moratoriums and then by a 1990 voter-approved initiative. The numbers of lions appear to have seesawed--down sharply when hunters bagged them, up dramatically when the protections took effect, now declining gradually through natural forces.

Many people talk about mountain lions, but relatively few have encountered them, despite the explosive population growth and suburbanization of California’s outback.

Verified sightings are even more uncommon: What are reported as lions often turn out to be dogs, especially golden retrievers, or other domestic animals. By one estimate, six out of 10 sightings are flawed.

In Redding, Fish and Game agents answering a resident’s call shot what they thought was a mountain lion. It turned out to be an Abyssinian house cat.

Gerbault, who has lived for years in the foothills, has seen the lions twice. Once, a cougar darted in front of her car as she drove her daughter to school. The lion ran alongside the car, then leaped into the forest. Near the town of Volcano, Gerbault saw a mother lion with two cubs in the brush.

Others have seen cougars, which usually roam at dawn or dusk, perched in trees, darting though undergrowth or sunning themselves on rocks. One Shasta County woman saw one crouched on a highway.

A Camino man in his hot tub stood up, nude, and waved and shouted at a lion after the animal approached. He edged into his house without turning his back on the cat, which left. A week later, the man’s son saw a mountain lion near their trash can.

Cougars have been seen throughout the state--in a Carmel backyard, in the woods of Humboldt County, in a Ventura orchard, in the Laguna Mountains east of San Diego, in Berkeley’s Tilden Park and the Oakland hills, in the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles, in the hills east of Susanville.

The lions’ favorite food is deer.

“The primary factor that would describe their distribution is the presence of deer,” Torres said.

Viewed as a scourge by early Californians, pumas were killed on sight. Later, the state authorized bounty killing, and some 12,400 cougars were killed for money between 1907 and 1963, when the bounties were withdrawn.

Current law allows a mountain lion to be killed only if it is a direct threat to a human, is ravaging livestock or is threatening an endangered species. Recently one cougar was killed because it posed a threat to protected bighorn sheep. Perhaps 200 lions are killed annually, most by ranchers trying to protect their stock.

But many rural residents see the cougars as simply part of life in the country.

“Any time you live in a rural environment and you have pets, hawks may get them. You have to pay attention to the animals. Raccoons can be really destructive. Skunks can be a problem. A bear that came here a couple of years ago entered people’s houses and destroyed kitchens,” Gerbault said. “You just have to pay attention.”