Recent encounters with mountain lions in suburban Morgan Hill
have heightened awareness of a potential problem and focused
attention on the mixed blessing of living so near wildlands.
Recent encounters with mountain lions in Morgan Hill’s suburban territory have heightened awareness of a potential problem and focused attention on the mixed blessing of living so near wildlands.
When Morgan Hill Police killed a 6-month-old lion in a residential backyard on March 9, they received many phone calls deploring their actions. However, every time a lion is sighted, from Llagas and Uvas canyons to Holiday Lake Estates, other callers ask why the police aren’t doing something about the threat to dogs, cats, children and, possibly adults.
In Sabino Canyon near Tucson, an unusually high number of confirmed lion sightings – in broad daylight, near visitors and main roads in the recreation area – has caused Arizona Game and Fish Department to order a lion hunt.
Several visitors reported the normally nocturnal lions growling at them and acting in a threatening manner.
An elementary school is adjacent to the Morgan Hill backyard where the “teenaged” lion and two siblings were found; Sabino Canyon has an elementary and middle school within 1,000 feet of the canyon’s entrance.
Arizona residents are split, as are Morgan Hill’s, between the “save the lions, we moved into their territory” and the “get rid of them, they’re a danger” positions.
Cat attacks have always been rare, but starting in 1991, this has been changing. Author David Baron has described in “The Beast in the Garden,” published in November 2003, an incident near Denver when 18-year-old Scott Lancaster went out for a run, was set upon and partially eaten by a mountain lion. The lion was later spotted closely watching the search party that discovered his body.
Before, Baron said, “a mountain lion might attack a person if it felt cornered, or … if it were rabid, but it wouldn’t attack a person the way it would a deer – prey.”
When a lion kills a deer, Baron said, it bites the neck, drags the body to a private spot and eats in a particular manner, beginning with the organs, then covering the carcass with leaves and twigs to hide it until the next meal.
Searchers were startled and dismayed to find the human victim treated in the same way.
“Unfortunately, Scott Lancaster’s death signaled the beginning of a trend,” Baron said in an interview that accompanied his book’s publication. Since 1991, he said, 45 people have been attacked by mountain lions in the U.S. and Canada and five have been killed. The trend continues.
Two cyclists were attacked, one killed and partially eaten, in Southern California earlier this year. The second victim was most likely saved only because her fellow cyclists drove the lion off – with difficulty. Later that night, while hunters were tracking the lion, a helicopter crew helping in the search reported that the lion was stalking the hunters. The lion was not rabid, reports said later.
Morgan Hill, of course, was the site of the earliest incident of a mountain lion killing a human being; in 1909 Isola Kennedy and Earl Willson died from rabies after being attacked near Coyote Creek. Without the rabies factor, the two were expected to recover.
Baron, a visiting scholar at Boston University and contributing science reporter for National Public Radio, said he became interested in the changing lion ecology after the 1991 Denver killing and what officials and residents must do to protect themselves and the wild animals.
Part of the problem, besides houses encroaching on the wilds, is the attitude of residents themselves, Baron said.
“People are inadvertently changing lion behavior, by luring the cats in among homes and encouraging them to lose their fear of us,” he said. Finding fawns cute, putting out food or salt licks for deer just makes the area more attractive. Baron actually considers deer more dangerous to humans than lions, considering car crashes from running into them and Lyme disease from deer ticks.
However, Baron does realize that the issue needs to be faced, and soon. Removing the deer attraction is critical but, if a lion hangs around a populated area, he says, Fish and Game needs to act. In Boulder, Colo, animal control officers carry guns that shoot rubber bullets and beanbags.
“They use those to haze lions from yards, to teach the cats that loitering among homes can be painful,” Baron said. “If a lion continues to hang around, it will be tranquilized and relocated, or even euthanized.”
Beanbags are not part of the MHPD arsenal, but the procedure was the same.
Lt. Dave Fox of the state Department of Fish and Game, who reviewed MHPD’s handling of the March 9 incident where one lion was killed by police, another escaped was struck by a car and killed; the third was tranquilized and released. Fox is comfortable that police followed state procedures properly. But he is aware of an increasing problem.
“There are more homes in the lions’ territory,” Fox said. “People ask why they come into town. They’ve been there all the time.” He said people should take a bit of extra care when in lion country – now almost everywhere near a creek or open space – covering outside dog kennels, not letting children wander off alone.
“They are looking for deer but they will eat your cat or dog too,” Fox said.
As any Morgan Hill hillside resident can attest, there are plenty of deer around and dogs and cats too.
“We don’t want to alarm people, but you do need to be careful,” he said.
Fish and Game officials are wrestling with the question of how to handle the changing situation.
“We’re supposed to protect the public,” Fox said, “but what do we tell them? We as citizens have to come to grips with this: at what point do we do something? We all love to see them and know they’re there (at a distance) but how should the agencies deal with them?”
He said you can’t blame the lions who are, after all, just acting naturally.
A mountain lion was spotted last week near a killed deer at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, an unusual event that caused, Fox said, the expected dual reaction.
“It’s a very emotional issue,” he said. “We have to learn not to overreact – they were here first.”
Education, he said, is best way at the moment, to deal with the increasing clash of humans with the big cats. He wants to be nonpolitical, nonemotional and just get the facts to the people.
“If we want lions to be protected, we’re going to have to learn to live with them,” Fox said.” He said he gets a lion-sighting call every week with the resident saying “nobody told me it would be a problem when I moved here.”
Steve Amerige who runs the Uvas area Armsby Lane community website (www.armsbylane.com), said he posts lion and rattlesnake sightings on the site for residents to be on the alert. After seeing a lion and three cubs on their front porch, Amerige reported, his neighbors sold their house and moved.
“They were afraid for their children,” Amerige said. The new owners are used to wildlife, dangerous and otherwise, and have no problem keeping an extra eye out, he said.
PAST AND PRESENT
Mountain lions, also known as pumas or cougars, were persecuted from the days of early California, Fox said.
“They were shot on site by farmers,” he said, “just like wolves and grizzly bears.”
A letter by Martin Murphy, Sr. from the early 1850s said the biggest problem he had running cattle in San Martin was the grizzly bears. They are now extinct in California.
Until 1963 the State of California paid a bounty for a lion skull, more for females than males. After that they were treated as game animals; hunters needed a license to take them. In 1969 Governor Ronald Reagan issued a moratorium on hunting and in 1991 it was forbidden permanently.
Fox chafes under the 1991 “no hunting” rules because it upset the balance that kept the big cats’ numbers under control. Lions, rare in 1963 have probably doubled or tripled since then, he said.
“They used to be west of the Rockies (only),” he said, “but now it wouldn’t surprise me if the numbers were the same as in the days of Lewis and Clark (1803-6).”
Baron said cougars lived from coast to coast but were systematically hunted until they were all but extinct east of the Rockies, except for the Florida panthers, which are endangered. Now, he says, they show up near Minneapolis, at a loading dock in San Bernardino, around the Midwest.
Neither Fox nor John Norris, a local Fish and Game officer, have heard news of the third young lion, caught, tagged and released in the hills west of Morgan Hill.
“Hopefully we never see that cub again,” Norris said. “We’re assuming that the critter’s out there getting a fair shake at survival.”
The three young cats were not, as suggested by some residents, the offspring of a mountain lion killed by a car on Watsonville Road in late January.
“It was a big, mature male,” Fox said, “not a female.” This was confirmed by Martha Schauss, a Fish and Game biologist. “Lions hide their sex organs quite well making it hard to tell, especially if you don’t get too close,” Fox said.
The Beast in the Garden, A Modern Parable of Man and Nature, by David Baron. Available at your local bookstore.
