Grand Canyon Biologist Homes In on Park’s Big Cats

The parking lots here often teem with cars, and restaurants overflow with people, but this national park can still be a very wild place.

Just ask biologist Elaine Leslie.

She has been monitoring and tracking mountain lions in Grand Canyon National Park since 1994, using small grants and spare time to map their range.

“We know they’re here,” Leslie said. “What we want to do is see where they’re going.”

The entire national park includes habitat suitable for the large cats, she said. Leslie has found them on all four rims and inside the canyon.

What she doesn’t know yet is how frequently they enter developed areas. Leslie hopes in the coming months to study the animals’ comings and goings to determine where they are going and whether the park’s warning signs are aggressive enough.

Leslie wants to outfit a few of the roaming predators with satellite collars. That would allow researchers to see real-time signals marking the mountain lions’ locations.

Eventually she’d also like to set up a display in the visitors’ center allowing visitors to see the lions as they move through the park.

Finding mountain lions can be difficult; some male lions use 100 square miles as their home range. Because their range is so large, researchers know the big cats move in and out of the national park.

Mountain lions can be found throughout most of Arizona. Game and Fish Department officials estimate that 2,500 to 3,000 of the cats live in the state’s hills. Exact numbers are hard to come by.

“They’re a secretive animal. They don’t occur in high density, so you can’t just go out there and find them,” said John Phelts, a biologist for Game and Fish.

Still, state officials believe Arizona’s mountain lion population is probably larger now than it has been in recent decades. Phelts said people have become more tolerant of them, and most development has occurred in the valleys rather than the mountains they inhabit.

Phelts said he isn’t aware of any deaths directly related to lion attacks in recent years, though there have been a number of close calls.

Leslie said that occasionally she or other park officials find mountain lion kills in developed areas. Dead deer and antelope have even been found on the South Rim trail, a popular lookout for visitors.