Local Cougars Face Extinction, Study Finds : Wildlife: The Santa Ana Mountains population is being decimated by illegal hunting, development and traffic, the report states.

SANTA ANA —  They die after horrific suffering, of gunshot wounds, gnarled limbs, disease and even cannibalism.

For the past five years, the decimation of a population of cougars has been tracked by wildlife biologists in the Santa Ana Mountains, where the cats once roamed freely in vast expanses of local wilderness.

This unprecedented study of cougar life in an 800-square-mile range has discovered that the animal today faces annihilation. Its killers include illegal hunting and the houses and roads that block its routes. But in findings unlike those of any similar study in the western United States, researchers have found that common vehicle traffic through these isolated regions kills more cougars than does anything else.

“The cougar population in the Santa Ana Mountain range is clearly in jeopardy of becoming extinct due to habitat loss and fragmentation,” said wildlife biologist Paul Beier, a researcher in the $700,000 study commissioned and funded by Orange County and the state Department of Fish and Game.

With increasing development, a UC Berkeley study has also determined, roads and freeways are cutting off key canyon passages that link the local cougar population with more plentiful numbers farther east.

Beier’s study contains few recommendations to help this “symbol of the wilderness” better coexist in the shadow of tract homes and freeways.

Besides installing chain-link fences along well-traveled mountain roadways and slowing the growth of residential and commercial development, Beier said, “there is not much you can do.”

For example, near a cougar passageway called the Penchanga Corridor--described as the most critical link to ensure the predator’s future stability in the Santa Ana Mountains--an amusement park is planned for construction, just south of Temecula.

“Controlling development is absolutely the key,” Beier said. “But that’s a political problem, not a biological problem.”

Though it contains no political strategy to block further human encroachment into wildlife habitats, the report does show--often in graphic detail--how cougars have succumbed to the effects of increased development.

One example of urbanization’s influence on the cougar range area is the San Joaquin Hills near Laguna Beach, long thought to have supported the cats. But the hills have become so isolated by development that they can no longer sustain them, according to the report.

The findings, said Pete De Simone of the Audubon Society, can be used as valuable tools for environmentalists as they fight to preserve local open space.

Perhaps the most startling findings of the study involve the byproduct of any development: transportation.

Of the 32 cougars fitted with electronic tracking collars and studied during the past five years, only seven survive today, researchers said. A third of those that died were hit by cars, the most common cause of death.

One cat, known to researchers as M-10, suffered two encounters with Southern California traffic, the second one fatal.

Attempting a nighttime crossing of the Riverside Freeway at Coal Canyon, the cougar broke a leg and managed to escape when police arrived. But more than a year later, the cat, fully recovered from the first accident, again darted into traffic, this time on Santiago Canyon Road, where it was hit and died of internal injuries.

The study identified Santiago Canyon Road and the rural Ortega Highway as among the most dangerous of all cougar roadway crossings.

Researchers found that road deaths were not a factor in the demise of cougars anywhere else in the western states. In most previous studies, it was found that hunting and “predator-control activities” caused the most deaths.

De Simone, manager of the Starr Ranch Sanctuary, said that one of the biologists involved in the cougar study talked frequently of losing cats in traffic accidents during the study period.

“One day we would be talking about it, and the next day he would bring in a road kill,” De Simone said. “He talked of how he could never keep one of their radio-collared lions from getting hit. This (report) is just another example of how we are destroying much too much of natural habitat out here.”

Currently, researchers estimate that the local cougar population consists of 10 to 14 adult females, as many as five adult males and 10 to 20 cubs. About 800 square miles of habitat exist to support those numbers, but Beier said the most important consideration is to keep pathways or “wildlife corridors” open to connect ranges within the habitat.

The study showed that cougars will travel vast distances during nighttime hunting sessions, sometimes several miles, and need passageways that provide an interconnected range.

The corridors also provide key breeding links between cougars in the Santa Ana Mountains and larger numbers in the Palomar range near Temecula. The most critical of those passageways is known as the Penchanga Corridor.

The corridor, named for the Penchanga Creek, which runs between the two areas, has become increasingly threatened by the presence of Interstate 15 and development south of Temecula. During the study period, researchers reported, four cougars were killed while attempting to cross Interstate 15.

One of the options for promoting safer passage, according to the study, is constructing a fence along Interstate 15 to divert cougars to an underpass that would allow critical access for cats traveling west into the Santa Ana range.

“Although I-15 is the biggest hurdle today, within a few short years, urbanization--if not controlled--will present an even more impenetrable barrier,” the study stated.

“All regional parks, except (Ronald W.) Caspers Wilderness Park (near San Juan Capistrano), will become unusable by cougars if urbanization isolates them from the central habitat block,” the study found. “Such isolation is certain to occur without careful management of urban growth along Santiago Canyon Road.”

The study’s focus on the threatened habitat clearly overshadowed its conclusions about cougar encounters with humans.

Although the study was initiated after mountain lions mauled two children in separate attacks in Caspers Regional Park in 1986, Beier’s research found that in the past 100 years only 10 deaths can be attributed to cougars in the United States and Canada. Furthermore, the local study found that “cougars entered urban areas with astonishing rarity and were generally unseen by the thousands of potential observers in their midst.”

“The cougars in our study were remarkably adept at avoiding contact with humans,” the report said, “and it is difficult to imagine that their behavior could have been more reclusive.”

Said Beier: “I think most would agree with me that cougars are no more dangerous to humans than breathing the Southern California air.”

Few may be in a better position to offer such an assessment than Beier, who has spent years tracking the animal and recording its habits.

“Probably more than any other animal, the cougar symbolizes the wilderness,” Beier said. “This is an animal with quite a bit of presence. They are the epitome of strength and stealth. But when you come across a (cougar’s) fresh kill, like a deer, something so much larger than a cat, you get a deep respect for its strength. The ecosystem would be a much sadder place without it.”