GPS reveals secret lives of mountain lions
Sunday, April 4, 2004 Posted: 10:00 PM EDT (0200 GMT)
CUYAMACA RANCHO STATE
PARK, California (AP) -- New technology is giving
scientists a window into the life of the mountain lion,
a hunter so stealthy that the American Indians called it
"the ghost of the Rockies."
The results are surprising researchers -- the big
cats are not as leery of urban settings as had been
thought, and they don't necessarily develop an appetite
for domestic livestock.
For the past three years, 20 lions in and around San
Diego County's Cuyamaca Rancho State Park were outfitted
with $5,000 Global Positioning System collars that
allowed researchers to trace their nocturnal travels.
The collars' signals showed that mountain lions --
also known as cougars or pumas -- were crossing busy
highways and just skirting clusters of homes.
"What surprised me the most is the degree of
adaptability to what I consider to be high human
activity in puma habitat," said Ken Logan, one of
the researchers on the study and the author of
"Desert Puma" based on a decade of research in
New Mexico.
The continuing $200,000-a-year study by the
University of California, Davis, may provide a better
understanding of why a predator that normally avoids
people sometimes comes dangerously close.
In January, a lion killed cyclist Mark Reynolds in an
Orange County park and then seriously injured a second
cyclist a short time later. A scenic canyon outside
Tucson, Arizona, was closed for part of March because
pumas were repeatedly seen in broad daylight and
apparently without their normal fear of humans.
The UC Davis researchers want to understand whether
mountain lion behavior changes as they get used to
people. It's a question that's key to the cougar's
survival in the fast-growing West. In California, even
though a voter initiative outlawed trophy hunting of
mountain lions, more than 700 have been killed over the
past decade for threatening or harming people. From 1909
to 1963, more than 12,000 were hunted and killed in
California.
"There might be ways with better understanding
to know how to behave around lions to reduce the public
safety incidents or lion attacks," said Walter
Boyce, director of the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center
and lead researcher on the project.
The study in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, 35 miles
east of San Diego, found that during the day, the
GPS-collared lions typically slept at least a football
field's length away from the nearest trail and even
farther from buildings.
After the sun set, however, the cats used the park's
extensive trail system and crept closer to buildings.
Mark Jeffrey Reynolds died in a mountain
lion mauling along a bicycle trail in Orange
County, California, January 8, 2004.
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One 3-year-old male, dubbed M-2, crossed Interstate 8
and two other highways a total of 48 times during a
six-month period in 2002. He ultimately was killed by a
vehicle.
The GPS plot of the travels of a 2-year-old female
called F-8 showed a clear orbit around -- although never
through -- private properties in the rural eastern San
Diego County community of Harrison Park.
A separate study of three pumas in the Santa Monica
National Recreation Area outside Los Angeles found one
ventured into a graffiti-covered underpass to cross a
highway.
The results of the UC Davis study are challenging
some of the assumptions of state game wardens. Lt. Bob
Turner, who has killed dozens of mountain lions over
more than two decades with the California Department of
Fish and Game, said he no longer believes that a cougar
must be killed once it eats domestic animals.
F-8 was collared after she ate an alpaca, a small
cousin of llamas, in a pen near the park. But after the
alpaca breeder modified the fencing around her remaining
livestock, the mountain lion returned to hunting deer.
"Close to 50 percent of the lions killed could
be avoided if people could be responsible," Turner
said. "Most people are plain stupid."
"We are not on the menu," said Doug Updike,
a biologist with the California Department of Fish and
Game. "If a lion had any desire to catch and eat
people, we would see literally hundreds of people dying
every day."
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