Last August, months before the coronavirus pandemic accustomed us to seeing wildlife in empty city streets, a mountain lion walked into San Francisco. Not much is known of the carnivore’s journey to the city, but one can imagine. The young male, likely searching for territory of his own, may have snuck out of the Santa Cruz Mountains south of the city. From there, he ventured quietly through the parks, golf courses, neighborhoods, and commercial districts of Daly City and the Peninsula. Then, hitting the row houses near Lake Merced like a wall, he headed west, met the coastline at Ocean Beach, and followed it north. With the ocean to his left and the hotels, cafes, and bars of the Sunset District to his right, he finally reached a break in the city at Golden Gate Park, where a manicured grove of Monterey pine and cypress beckoned.
That’s where city park officials spotted him and alerted the community. Then the cat disappeared, resuming his stealthy journey through the Bay Area.
“They just need protected cover — traveling at night and lying low during the day,” said Chris Wilmers, a wildlife ecologist and cougar expert, as he traced the Golden Gate Park mountain lion’s speculative path on a map in his office at the University of California, Santa Cruz. During a decade of research, Wilmers has collared more than 100 cougars in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The GPS-equipped collars plot the cougars’ movements as they wander the landscape in search of food and mates. For the most part, these lions stay within redwood forests or chaparral canyons. But sometimes they wander through parks and backyards, across highways, or, like the Golden Gate cougar, into urban areas.
Mountain lions that cross these unseen boundaries can fall into trouble. Each year, about 90 California cougars are killed after they prey on livestock, according to data from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Collisions with cars kill another 100 — though, according to Justin Dellinger, a state mountain lion biologist, that number is significantly underreported. “It could be twice that,” he said.
Biologists say these untimely outcomes are caused by highways and suburbs that fragment the habitat of a highly mobile species. The barriers between cougar populations present another threat: restricted genetics. Cats that can’t move around inbreed, which can cause susceptibility to disease and reproductive abnormalities.
“When you put all that together, it’s a recipe for a population at risk,” said Winston Vickers, a University of California, Davis veterinarian who studies cougars in southern California. Some of these populations, Vickers explained, could face extinction in a matter of decades.
More protection could be on the way. In April, the state Fish and Game Commission granted six marooned populations of cougars temporary protection under state law. But the potential for jurisdictional protection begs a practical question: how can cougars be safe in the West’s ever-expanding urban areas? For Wilmers in the Bay Area, Vickers in southern California, and researchers and conservationists throughout the West, the question of mountain lion protection hinges on how we perceive and interface with them, especially as our habitat — in the form of livestock yards, highways, and suburban sprawl — blends with theirs. “More and more development means more threats to habitat and connectivity,” Wilmers said.
Solutions are emerging. Wildlife overpasses and tunnels, smarter and denser development, and nonlethal methods to mitigate predator-livestock conflict could save hundreds of cougars each year. In sum, they are emblematic of a shift in how we view the divide between nature and cities. In his 1995 essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” environmental historian William Cronon lambasts the idea that nature exists solely within wilderness areas or national parks. “If wildness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world,” he wrote.
As Western states address threats to mountain lions, many are finding the task requires a much bigger frame of conservation than previously thought. We’re discovering there isn’t wilderness just for cougars and cities just for people. Rather, there is only, as Cronon wrote, “the home that encompasses them both.”
Puma concolor goes by many names: mountain lion, cougar, panther, catamount. Widespread as they are — pumas range from the Yukon to the southern reaches of the Andes — they’ve earned the nickname “ghost cat” pretty much everywhere because they’re so elusive. Wilmers has never seen one in the wild “fair and square,” as he phrased it — he’s always needed the assistance of baited traps or hounds to locate them for research.
But the ghosts seem to be showing up more often. During the current pandemic, Boulder, Colorado residents have seen them wandering neighborhoods and napping in backyard trees. Cougars, of course, hung out in cities well before COVID-19 drove us all indoors. For the most part, they steer clear of people, but some conflicts do occur. In February, a mountain lion reportedly attacked a 6-year-old girl at a park near San Jose, and another attack took place a month earlier in Orange County. In 2018, a bicyclist in North Bend, Washington, was killed by a mountain lion in the state’s first fatal cougar attack in almost a century. A trail runner encountered a mountain lion just outside Fort Collins, Colorado, last year, and killed the cat in self defense.
Such incidents, though rare, can stoke a collective fear of predators, and they’ll likely become more common — especially in California. “We’re on our way to 40 million people in California, and about 40 percent of this state is regarded as suitable mountain lion habitat,” said Quinton Martins, a mountain lion ecologist based in Sonoma County. “Inevitably, we’ll have more overlap between mountain lions and people.”
Human-cougar interactions typically end poorly for the lion, particularly when our livestock or pets are involved. In the summer of 2019, Martins received a GPS collar in the mail at his office near Santa Rosa. Martins leads a study of mountain lion behavior for the nonprofit Audubon Canyon Ranch, and he had previously affixed the collar to a young male, labeled P14, near the coastal town of Jenner. For seven months, Martins traced the cougar’s movements through a landscape of coastal redwoods and river basins. Somewhere in the coniferous forests around the town of Point Arena, 50 miles up the coast from Jenner, the GPS signal went dark.
In California, landowners can acquire a depredation permit to lethally remove a mountain lion that has preyed on livestock. The young lion, it turned out, had killed a dozen sheep, and was killed in turn by the landowner.
“Mountain lions are timid,” Martins said. “But they do kill livestock and pets. That’s where the conflict really lies in California.”
Martins is from South Africa, where he worked in the safari industry and studied how leopards and humans interact. As in the West, ranchers there often hunted big cats that killed their livestock. Martins wanted to address carnivore conflict in ways that didn’t result in a dead leopard, so he started the Cape Leopard Trust to educate ranchers about better livestock enclosures and when and where to safely run livestock. He moved to northern California in 2016, and now directs the Audubon Canyon Ranch’s Living with Lions project. The goal, Martins explained, is to change public perception of these animals and show that lions don’t have to die for the sake of our livestock. “People have encroached on these animals’ space,” he said. “What we’re trying to do now is learn how to live with lions, to coexist.”
Historically, coexistence with predators hasn’t been a priority of many landowners in the West. Alongside wolves and grizzlies, mountain lions once represented an impediment to the ethos of manifest destiny. In 1907, California officially classified mountain lions as “bountied predator,” incentivizing their eradication by offering $20 per carcass. When the program ended in 1963, state-deployed hunters had killed 12,461 mountain lions. “[Trappers] were doing such a good job that they worked themselves out of a job,” said Dellinger, of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.
No one knows for sure how many mountain lions were left in the state after the bounty period, but Dellinger says it’s safe to assume the population recovered in the years since. State wildlife officials estimated in 1996 that about 5,000 cougars live in California, but Dellinger said that number could be wildly inaccurate. He’s currently four years into a statewide mountain lion population survey expected to take a decade to complete.
The recovery keeps Martins and others in his field busy. “We’ve been killing [mountain lions] for centuries, and we still have problems,” said Veronica Yovovich, a University of California, Berkeley biologist specializing in wildlife conflict mitigation. “We know that approach doesn’t solve the problem, so we have to develop other tools.”
In some instances, mitigating livestock-carnivore conflict nonlethally can be relatively simple. For many of the landowners in Martins’ study area north of San Francisco, where most of the livestock in question are goats or alpacas, cougar problems can be avoided by putting animals in a roofed enclosure. It gets a little more complicated, however, with open rangelands and larger livestock operations. Ranchers might have to incorporate turboflaggery, electric fences, range riders, livestock guardian dogs, motion-controlled sprinklers, and so on.
Yovovich has a unique opportunity to test these methods on rangeland owned by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, just west of San Jose. In November, Midpen decided that grazing lessees on its property would not be allowed to exercise lethal removal of mountain lions and coyotes, and the district pegged Yovovich to lead workshops with ranchers.
When I visited Yovovich at her office in Berkeley, she was excited — what she learns here could apply to numerous geographies. Midpen land is a mix of open rangeland and protected space, all on the edge of a burgeoning suburban area. “That mosaic represents anywhere in the West,” she said. “All the information we get there can be extended to anybody else who’s having problems with mountain lions.”
Mountain lions contend with more than just ranchers defending their livestock. Take, for instance, 46M, a male lion tracked by Wilmers in 2014. The cougar gained notoriety when local officials discovered him in a parking garage in the middle of Silicon Valley. Police called Wilmers to safely capture and relocate the animal, but five months later, the cougar was hit by traffic in the hills above Stanford University and killed.
This is a common issue around the state. Vickers says a single culprit is responsible for killing half of his collared mountain lions in the Santa Ana Mountains southeast of Los Angeles: Interstate 15.
But it’s the long-term impact of these highways that has researchers most worried. In 2018, a team led by University of Wyoming scientists (Wilmers and Vickers were co-authors) published findings that California’s mountain lion population consisted of nine distinct genetic populations — a sign that habitat fragmentation has caused low genetic diversity.
“You look at other areas throughout the West, and you see that the genetic diversity is more spread out,” said Tiffany Yap, a wildlife scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The pattern here is that roads and development seem to be what shape those populations.”
Take Wilmers’ Santa Cruz Mountains population, one of the nine identified in the Wyoming paper. Its range falls within boundaries created by the coastline to the west and south, San Francisco to the north, and Highway 101 to the east. By nature, mountain lions — males in particular — tend to disperse from their home territories and spread their genetics throughout large swaths of habitat. But in his decade tracking mountain lions near Santa Cruz, Wilmers has never seen one make it outside their modern, hemmed-in territory.
That genetic isolation has drastic implications. Last March, Vickers published a study saying that some California cougar populations face extirpation within the next half-century. “It’s remarkable to me that we can really cause potential extinction of such a highly mobile and capable animal,” he said.
Genetic diversity has long been a mainstay of cougar conservation. In Florida, for instance, wildlife managers were so concerned with inbreeding among panthers that in 1995 they transported “new blood” from Texas to aid the panthers’ recovery. In California, however, state biologists and researchers are focused on habitat restoration rather than relocating individual animals.
“If you want to protect a mountain lion, you need to protect the building block for that predator to be able to continue to exist,” said Martins. “Conserving mountain lions is about broad habitat conservation.”
The data that Wilmers, Vickers, Martins, and other researchers have been collecting on mountain lion dispersal patterns is helping conservationists target linkages between populations that can improve genetic diversity. For instance, the Center for Biological Diversity and other conservation groups convinced a superior court judge that a 270-acre mixed development and multilane highway in Temecula would block a corridor that links two lion populations, one in the Santa Ana Mountains and one in the Eastern Peninsula Range. The court’s decision to pause the development could set a precedent throughout the southern part of the state.
Last year, the Center took its legal battle even further when it petitioned the state to list certain populations of mountain lions as threatened under the state Endangered Species Act. In April, the state Fish and Game Commission voted to move the petition forward, kicking off a yearlong review to determine whether these populations should be formally listed. If they are, “both state and local agencies would have a mandate to protect mountain lions,” said J.P. Rose, an attorney with the Center who led the litigation against Temecula and other proposed developments in the Los Angeles area. “Local officials would need to coordinate closely with Fish and Wildlife to ensure that development projects don’t block existing corridors.”
Already, there are examples to draw from. The California Department of Transportation is building a wildlife tunnel beneath Highway 17, a known migration barrier that bisects the Santa Cruz Mountains. Nearby, the Peninsula Open Space Trust and the city of San Jose spent $93 million to preserve a wildlife corridor between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range. In the Santa Monica Mountains, engineers are designing what will be the largest wildlife bridge in the world over Highway 101. Advocates are quick to highlight smaller fixes, too: retrofitting culverts, restoring native vegetation, lowering highway median barriers, and so on.
“Southern California is providing an on-the-ground laboratory for identifying how to stop or repair the fragmentation of habitat that’s causing wildlife species to be isolated,” said Trish Smith, an ecologist with The Nature Conservancy. Sure, there are still plenty of challenges ahead for mountain lion conservation — land acquisition, the cost of wildlife-friendly infrastructure, and public acceptance of apex predators roaming freely to name a few. But Smith and others are hopeful about the recent progress.
“There’s a potential to link these wildlife populations from the U.S.-Mexico border to the Oregon-California border,” she said. “But we don’t have much time to act. It’s a major conservation challenge that requires that we work collaboratively and creatively.”
In 2013, I woke up early to hike to the Numa Ridge Fire Lookout in Glacier National Park. The sun had already risen, but the cedars and hemlocks kept the trail shaded in a quiet dawn. A mile up the ridge, I rounded a switchback and came to a halt. There, perhaps 20 feet away, an adult cougar tread steadily up the trail with silent steps. I froze and tried to remember the protocol of staying calm, facing forward, and backing away slowly, but the golden cat gave nothing more than a lazy glance over its shoulder, turned off the trail, and faded from view.
“To see one in the wild is a life-changing experience. Very few people get that opportunity,” Smith told me. “They seem to conjure up that feeling of wilderness.”
But even more than wilderness, that mountain lion in Montana makes me think of the adaptability of creatures in our region. Cougars in Golden Gate Park and Glacier are reminders that these animals occupy the whole West, not just the preserved wildernesses and untouched landscapes with which we associate these charismatic species.
In her office, Yovovich, the Berkeley carnivore specialist, showed me a few photographs that she uses in workshop presentations. In one, a grainy security image shows a young cougar standing on the hood of a Toyota Camry parked in a San Jose driveway. Another shows a family of mountain lions on a ridge in the Sierra Azul, the skyline of Silicon Valley stretched out before them. “This perfectly captures the Bay Area to me,” she said.
How different, really, is a mountain lion in a Silicon Valley driveway from the one I shared a trail with in Montana? Both feel the pressure of human presence on the landscape. Both are at the mercy of how we choose to perceive them. And both live here — in cities, wilderness, and everything in between.
