For Mountain Lions, a Life and Death Study

Swirling clouds occupy the upper reaches of the San Jacinto Mountains high above Borrego Springs, enveloping everything in a chill dampness. A bullying wind shakes the trail-less chaparral through which Ken Logan swims, crashes and pulls his way toward, he hopes, an encounter with F-7.

F-7 stands for “Female 7,” an adult mountain lion traveling with her two large male cubs. F-7 wears a $4,400 Global Positioning Satellite collar that Logan, a PhD research scientist with the Wildlife Health Center at UC Davis, had placed on her two months before. On four consecutive days each month, for about 10 minutes each day, F-7’s GPS collar automatically transmits data that traces her whereabouts during the preceding month. Today is a transmission day, and Logan must get close enough for his receiver to pick up her collar’s signals clearly.

It is an exhausting trek. After nearly three hours, Logan has covered scarcely five kilometers and is still a ridge line away from where a small-plane pilot spotted F-7 the previous day. When transmission time arrives, he tries to tune in a signal. All he gets is a slight chirp, a faint signal from one of the cub’s radio collars, somewhere far down Borrego Palm Canyon. Today F-7 will remain a phantom, an electronic rumor in the forbidding landscape.

Logan is widely considered the country’s premier mountain lion researcher. He and his wife, Linda Sweanor, conducted a 10-year study of the animals in the remote Chihuahua Desert and San Andres Mountains of New Mexico. It is the most thorough ever. The couple moved to California a year ago to study the complicated relationships among mountain lions, bighorn sheep, deer and people in sections of the Anza-Borrego Desert and Cuyamaca Rancho state parks.

In California, mountain lion conservation has been passionately contested for a generation, with environmentalists decrying the big cats’ loss of habitat and hunters and ranchers insisting the animals thrive too much. Onto these turgid waters Logan hopes to pour the oil of dispassionate science. His and Sweanor’s work in New Mexico resulted in that state’s adopting a flexibile, science-based approach that permits regulated hunting in some areas and nuisance kills in others, but also establishes large no-kill zones.

These days the emotional battle over mountain lion hunting in California seems ironic. Although voters approved Proposition 117 in 1990, making California the only state that bans the practice, its ultimate effect has been essentially moot.

During 1970-71 and 1971-72, the only two seasons in which recreational hunting of lions was legal in the state, sportsmen killed a total of 118. In the year 2000, 149 of the creatures were tracked down and killed under so-called “depredation permits,” which allow the destruction of lions deemed a threat to livestock, domestic animals or people.

The undoing of Prop. 117 has been accomplished not by hunting interests or ranchers but by the same relentless force that is squeezing the wildness and wonder out of California life in so many other ways, namely, human overpopulation and suburban sprawl. Today, in the state’s ever-expanding urban fringes, depredation permits are most commonly issued for attacks on the pets and hobby animals of suburbanites who’ve migrated to lion country and find to their shock that it’s a wilder place than, say, Irvine. Across the West we are now killing as many as 3,800 lions a year--more than triple the highest annual number during the 60 years when the creatures had a nuisance bounty on their heads.

Nobody really knows how many mountain lions prowl California. Because they’re not game animals, there is no consistent monitoring of their numbers (4,000 to 6,000 is the official guesstimate).

The big cats are famously athletic, combative and ferocious, but they avoid people. Increased sightings in recent years are likely due to increased human intrusion on the large hunting ranges the animals require, an average 120 square miles for an adult male.

Indeed, the existence of so many humans in lion habitat is what drew Logan and Sweanor to Southern California. “Linda and I wanted to see how these mountain lions make a living in this highly peopled landscape,” Logan says. “It all boils down to whether we want to coexist with them. I think we can if we follow some simple rules, like keeping our domestic animals in predator-proof enclosures at night. But if we don’t want to coexist, we’ll kill every last one of them. Personally, I wouldn’t want to live in a place where there aren’t predators on the wild landscape. And I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a society that did away with them. Mountain lions are the last big, healthy, efficient predator in the West.”

He’s wrong on that last point, of course. With our off-road vehicles and tract homes and desire for the easy life in difficult landscapes, no matter the cost to other species, we know who really deserves the title.