One day, while I was probably off somewhere around Boulder searching for more kill sites, my boss and his assistant got wind of our lion hanging out in someone's backyard in the same town where the unfortunate orange cat with the broken tooth met his demise. Apparently this lion waltzed right up to somebody's sliding glass door in broad daylight, let her two kittens (who were maybe 20-30 pounds by this time) play in full view of someone with a video camera, and then left to hang out around the bike trail/ravine.
I suppose I should say more about the location and the situation first. Yes, I believe this place is considered a suburb of Denver, but it is extremely close to some Open Space (public) parks, and lions could get there fairly easily by crossing only one major highway. Most of the time, our lion hung out in "safe" places, up in the hills west of the suburb, and only occasionally came into town to pick off domestic cats. As far as we could tell, she never posed a danger to humans; she came in at night, left before daylight, and sometimes actually did kill deer out in the woods like she was supposed to. We were never certain that she had kittens until they showed up on camera. This is one of those situations where an agency might be blamed for not taking action when they could have - we were monitoring her movements, yes, but it was clear that her behavior had not proven to be serious cause for alarm. Part of the reason I was hired, part of the reason we were doing this study on mountain lion eating habits, was to learn more about how they are adapting to humans. If a lion does attack or threaten a human - ever - it is taken very seriously, and as this story proves, our agency did pay attention when a lion's behavior took a turn for the more dangerous: for example, when they start taking their kittens for strolls in densely populated neighborhoods in the middle of the day.
Anyway, that same day (I think), my boss and his assistant headed to this town to capture the cat and her kittens, and move them back into Open Space land. I was not there for this. Evidently, the mother cat had holed herself up in a tiny culvert, and my boss was forced to walk within feet of her - confined in a very tight space - to dart her. I'm not sure how they caught the kittens, but I know they did; they replaced the mother's collar (which had been failing, if you remember), and also outfitted the kittens with some ear-tag transmitters; a pretty cool invention that lets us track the kittens without having to worry about them outgrowing their collars. One of the kittens had a VHF-only transmitter (which means we could only track the signal with traditional radio telemetry), and the other had a special transmitter that could actually collect and transmit GPS locations like a collar. I could be wrong, but I think this latter transmitter did NOT have a VHF signal associated with it, and it was sort of experimental.
After the animals were fully examined and outfitted with their new bling, they were taken to one of the Open Space lands far from the suburban town, where they were released. Releasing cats coming out of sedation is always tricky business, so we always try to find a spot where a groggy cat can stumble around without hurting itself, and spend the next week or so monitoring its activity closely to make sure everything is OK. Different scientists may do it differently; in my old job in California, we waited several hours with the bobcat in a cage trap, making sure it was entirely awake before we released it. Here, we couldn't always wait; the lions can hurt themselves if they're left in a cage trap too long, and also, in case you hadn't noticed, lions are a lot bigger and more dangerous than bobcats; thus, releasing a fully awake (and very annoyed) lion in close proximity to humans may not be the best idea. It is safe to say, however, that wildlife biologists try to do what is best for everyone involved - including the animals.
For some reason I feel like I may have been around for this, but I can't be sure - one of those tricky memory things where maybe I imagined myself there, when really I just heard it from someone else. Anyway, evidently the mother and kittens were released at the same time, but it's possible that they wandered off in different directions; regardless, the events of the next day seemed to indicate that something had gone awry.
Because the next day, Mama showed up in the same exact culvert, and her kittens were nowhere to be found.
Follow the link to the Story from the Denver news, or watch the video below from MSNBC.
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
No comments:
Post a Comment