By Kevin Hansen
Cougars once laid claim to the most extensive range of any land mammal in the Western Hemisphere. They once roamed from the Yukon to the southern tip of South America, and from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific. That they can be found from sea level to 14,000 feet, and in habitats as diverse as Northwest forests, Southwest deserts, and the Florida Everglades, attests to their resilience and adaptability. Adaptable, but not invulnerable. Habitat loss and persecution have reduced the cougar's North American range to the 12 western-most states, Mexico, British Columbia, Alberta, and a small remnant population in southern Florida.
Also known as mountain lions, pumas, panthers and catamounts, biologists call them Puma concolor. Their coat is a plain, tawny brown, while their distinctive heavy tail measures almost two-thirds the length of the head and body. The sexes look alike, though males are 30 to 40 percent larger. Males measure six to eight feet from nose to tail tip, compared with five to seven feet for females. A typical adult male will weigh 110 to180 pounds and the female 80 to 130 pounds. A rare heavyweight will top 200 pounds.
Newborn mountain lions enter the world weighing less than a pound. Litters average two or three cubs, which have coats covered with black and brown spots and rings around their tails. The cubs begin nursing minutes after birth. Within three weeks they weigh more than two pounds. After being weaned at two to three months, the young start to lose their spots and they accompany their mother to kills. At 17 months, their baby blue eyes have turned golden brown.
Many wildlife professionals believe the cougar is making a comeback. During the 1960s and 1970s most state wildlife departments reclassified the mountain lion from vermin to game animal, giving the big cat a greater measure of protection. (Only Texas still allows unrestricted killing of the cougar.) The setting aside of 700 million acres of public land and the passage of legislation such as the Wilderness Act protected critical habitat and improved chances for the cat’s survival. Wildlife managers point to increased sightings, as well as increased attacks on livestock and people. Compared to the status of cougar populations at the turn of the century, when most states still paid bounties they certainly seem to be resurgent in many parts of western North America.
"Mountain lion numbers have increased across the west," agrees cougar expert Kenney Logan. Logan and Linda Sweanor, his colleague and wife, conducted a 10-year mountain lion study in the San Andres Mountains of southern New Mexico. "But it is important to understand lions are recovering from depressed numbers, not just increasing. They are reestablishing populations in many areas. Man has been a dramatic mortality factor on cougar populations over the last 200 years and now we are simply not killing as many. Game status and the elimination of state-supported bounty hunters helped." Unfortunately, due to their stealthy and nocturnal lifestyle, there is just no reliable way to accurately count the elusive cats over a large area.
Lions are most commonly found in areas with plentiful deer and adequate cover. Such conditions exist not only in remote, primitive country, but in mountain subdivisions, urban fringes, and open space adjacent to housing. The sprawl of Denver, Tucson, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Boise and Salt Lake City presses in on the margins of cougar country. "People are moving to places where lions always have been and people never were," says Logan. When lions show up near populated areas and are subjected to the alarmist scrutiny of the media, the lions are quickly labeled a threat. But the perceived threat may reflect an increase in noise, not numbers.
In addition, more people are exploring wilderness areas than ever before. One reason we are seeing more cougars is because there are more people nearby to see them. Unlike early hunters and ranchers who probably shot cougars on sight and boasted only to neighbors, modern hikers who see a cougar in the wild consider themselves lucky and are more likely to report the sighting to a ranger.
Male pumas lead solitary lives, except when mating, while mature females are usually accompanied by cubs. Both sexes tend to space themselves out and confine their movements to individual home ranges. Such cats are called residents, and their home ranges can vary in size from 25 to 300 square miles, depending on quality of habitat and abundance of prey. Possession of a home range increases a resident's chance for survival by guaranteeing an established hunting ground. The larger home ranges of the male typically overlap or encompass several female ranges, but only occasionally overlap those of other resident males. However, female home ranges commonly overlap each other. Resident adult males use scrapes, collected piles of pine needles, leaves, or dirt that are marked with urine or scat, to mark their home ranges.
A typical population is composed of resident adults and their cubs, and transients. Cubs usually disperse from their mother's home range sometime during their second year and become transients, wandering for a year or more in search of their own home range. In one Nevada population, males traveled up to 31 miles from their birth areas, while females averaged 18 miles. Transients play an important role as replacements for resident lions who die from old age, accidents, fighting with other lions, or sport hunting. Sport hunting is legal in 11 western states (except California) and two Canadian provinces, and over 2,500 lions are killed every year, making it the leading known cause of death in cougars.
Despite occasional conflicts, some believe coexistence between people and cougars is possible. Canadian researcher Ian Ross is an advocate. Ross, along with Martin Jalkotzy and Ralph Schmidt, has studied Alberta's cougars for 13 years. "Education is the first step, but we have to go deeper and change our perception of predators. It is already taking place with the wolf and grizzly. Public support of predators is growing," Ross says. State wildlife agencies in California, Colorado, and Montana have produced excellent brochures on how to live with mountain lions.
It is safe to assume cougars are indifferent to our efforts to "manage" them. They are too busy being cougars, hunting, killing, raising their young. You may never see one, but they are out there. Cougars will never come into our home, sit down at our table and negotiate the conditions of our coexistence. It is we who must adapt if the cougar is to survive in the world we are shaping.
Kevin Hansen works as a wildlife biologist for the Bureau of Land Management and is the author of Cougar: The American Lion (Northland Publishing 1992).
