The cat came back - Part 2

Some of the details are fuzzy, since it's been two years; but somehow or other, we figured out that the lion had made her way back to the same exact culvert during the night.

We scanned for her kittens, but the GPS tag on the one wasn't working, and we couldn't pick up the VHF signal from the other. Our best guess was that Mama had lost her kittens after we released them, so she headed back to the last place she remembered seeing them - the recreation trail where they'd been caught the day before. My coworker and I drove to the Open Space land just to see if the kittens were there, and sure enough, the one with the VHF transmitter came in loud and clear. We drove back to the neighborhood with the news.

My boss and his assistant tried to figure out how best to handle the situation, and decided to first try to recapture the mother with the dart gun. I was asked to ride in the passenger seat of a wildlife game officer (aka conservation officer or wildlife manager, as they are known in other states) and be ready to chase the cat in case she made a run for it.

Here's a breakdown of the setting: the culvert was located on one of the banks on the edge of the bike trail/riparian stream area, where it dove under one of the roads, immediately abutting some backyard fences of the houses on the other side. The game officer and I were perched in the truck on the bike trail, which was on the other side of the creek, with a pretty good view of the culvert. Next to us ran another road, with more houses on the other side.

My boss approached the culvert, but evidently the lion remembered what had happened last time, and slunk out into the riparian area. The wildlife officer and I started driving parallel to her on the bike trail, as she crept along the fences across the creek. My boss hurried as close as he could behind her, waiting to get a good shot with the dart gun. From the truck, I could see everything perfectly, sitting on the edge of my seat as it all unfolded before my eyes.

It was the first (and, so far, only) time I'd ever seen a lion in motion, and words can't express what it was like. I could see her muscles contracting and expanding under her coat with every step, especially the ones in her shoulders and haunches. After a very short time, the lion decided she'd find better cover on the other side of the fence, and in a flash, she cleared the seven-foot wooden barrier with ease, disappearing on the other side.  We continued to parallel her as she moved through one backyard after another; every few seconds we'd see her leap the next fence separating one yard from the next. My boss kept up remarkably well, but never got a good shot.

I watched with worry as the lion approached a yard in which a large brown and white hound was barking his head off; I was afraid that I was about to watch a bloody fight begin. Fortunately, the barking seemed to deter the cat from continuing her trajectory; she turned into a sideyard and, from what we could tell, took off down the next street.

The wildlife officer and I, and our houndsman in a different truck who had waited at the culvert, quickly tried to locate her in the neighborhood, but it soon became clear that we had lost her. We could hear her signal, but it was obvious that she was on the move, and there really wouldn't be a good chance to dart her until she settled down somewhere.

We decided to go back to the Open Space land and try to find her kittens. In the meantime, my boss set up some cage traps back in the riparian area on the off chance that she returned in the evening. That done, we all headed to the field, stopping to pick up the hounds where they were being kenneled.

Each time I've joined on a chase with the hounds is a story in itself; it's one of the most exhausting things I've ever done. Typically it's done when there's fresh snow on the ground, so that the houndsman can find fresh cougar tracks for a starting point and know which way the cat was headed (since the hounds can sometimes follow a backtrail, moving further away from the cat). Usually we had three or four hounds, each one being "led" by a human, though it's usually the other way around, since they pull so hard when they're on the scent. Sometimes the houndsman would call to release them, and he'd follow them by monitoring their radio collars or listening to their baying. Mountain lions hate hounds: if they feel enough pressure, they'll run up a tree.

Another critical thing to know about hound chases: mountain lions like pretty rugged terrain, so if you're chasing them with hounds, prepare to be dragged up and down steep slopes, through thickets of prickly-pear cactus, and over rocky landslides with shifting, sliding pumpkin-sized stones or treacherous boulders the size of cars, all the while having your shoulder nearly ripped from its socket with each excited jerk of the leash. The excitement is contagious, however; there's something magical about the sound of a hound hot on the trail. And when the cat is treed, the sound changes, and no matter how hot the day or hard the trek, it always gives me goosebumps.

This particular hound chase was one of the shorter ones. We were in a canyon between two high hills. The eastern hill sloped steeply upward, ending in an impassable cliff at the top, which spanned the entire length of the hill, creeping higher until it ended in a rocky outcrop. Boulder fields dominated the hillsides, with juniper groves clinging to the flatter parts here and there.

(See picture below. I climbed the same hill again on another hound chase later in the season, and ended up following that cliff all the way to its knobby summit, where the cliffs finally revealed a small crevice from which people - and hounds - could get to the other side. When I got there, I was asked to go back down to the canyon bottom in case I needed to drive a truck out to pick everyone up somewhere further along the ridge, and when I turned around, I was absolutely shocked to see how high we had come.)

When everyone arrived in the canyon bottom, I was given the task of trying to pinpoint the signal of the kitten with the working VHF transmitter so the hounds would have a place to start. This is not an easy task in a canyon; the signal bounced off the steep hillsides, and I had to use every ounce of telemetry skill I could summon from the depths of my experience to produce the most accurate guess. After a few minutes, with my boss and a small crowd of other state employees waiting for me, I pointed up the hill and a little south, indicating a grove of juniper. The houndsman headed off with a dog or two, others followed with more, and the chase was on.

Armed with my telemetry equipment, I followed at a distance, hoping I had made the right guess and determined to provide the group with continual guidance as a) the kitten moved and b) I got higher up the hill and was better able to pinpoint the signal. As luck would have it, the dogs found the kitten's scent almost immediately and pulled off in the direction I had indicated. After only a matter of minutes, their excited barks changed - the cat was treed. I felt tremendously relieved that my telemetry guess had been right.

We were hoping the kittens had stayed together, and that we would find both in the same tree. If not, we hoped at least the treed kitten was the one with the non-working GPS transmitter, so we could still find the other one with VHF. Unfortunately, there was only one kitten in the tree, and it had the VHF tag. My boss's assistant darted it, someone climbed up to get it, and we hurried down the steep hill with it while the houndsman tried to refocus his dogs on finding the other kitten. I accompanied my boss back to the trucks, and while another group headed north along the hillside to try to find Kitten #2, I helped process the first one.

Unfortunately, we were unable to find the second kitten. It was starting to get late, so the hounds were called off. We had a bigger problem now - what to do about Mama.

As we pulled back into town, my field boss and I headed back into the neighborhood to see where she was while my boss, with the kitten in a cage trap in the back, met up with everyone else in a parking lot to rendezvous. Our cage traps had thus far been unsuccessful - whenever we trapped, each cage was fitted with a small radio transmitter that would emit a different signal if the trap door was closed. At this point, they were all still open.

As we searched for her, the bounce was terrible (since the neighborhood was near a rather large mesa), and we got lots of interference from houses, telephone lines, etc. We knew that she was in the neighborhood again, but couldn't pinpoint exactly where. After relaying this information to our boss, we decided to give her more time to go into the traps, while we stopped at a restaurant for some much-needed food and rest.

By this time, night had fallen completely. After maybe an hour and a half, we scanned for the trap signals again, and - success! One had been triggered. We quickly drove to the trap, and sure enough, there was Mama. My boss sedated her in the trap. When she was out, we carried her in the trap up out of the riparian area (me falling in the creek along the way as I struggled to help carry the 150-pound burden) and into the back of the truck, right next to her kitten.

Now this was one of my favorite memories from this experience: when the kitten had woken up inside the trap, he'd been a ball of growling, hissing fury, trying his best to look ferocious whenever we lifted the tarp to check on him. As we approached the truck, I could hear him start growling again, especially when the tarp was lifted so we could shove his trap over to make room for Mama. However, once she was in, and he looked over at her and got a good whiff, his demeanor changed entirely.

It was truly thrilling. I think his eyes actually widened, and he stopped growling immediately, never once moving his gaze away from her. As much as I wanted to stay and watch, we had to move out of the neighborhood and back to the Open Space land; but once we had covered them both with the tarp and gotten out of view, the kitten started calling to his mother.

It's a difficult sound to explain. I can liken it best to whistling - short, shrill whistles, not at all the sound you'd expect a cat to make. I drove with my boss in his truck, with the cats in the back. The entire drive up the highway, even through the sound of the engine, and the wind rushing past the open windows, I could hear the kitten whistling to his mother.

My part in this story is almost over. We decided to leave both Mom and Kitten in the same area they had been released before, but inside the traps, hoping that maybe the other kitten, if it was still in the area, would be drawn to the sound and smell of them. I can't remember why, but we had to wait for quite a while at the entrance to the canyon, all of us exhausted and silent as the autumn chill crept into the truck.

When we finally drove into the canyon, we stopped and carried them far from the road, filled the traps with straw and covered them with tarps to ward off cold and bad weather, and left them for the night. Early the next morning, having driven 1.5 hours back to Fort Collins the night before, we drove 1.5 hours back, picked up the hounds, and tried to find the other kitten. Unfortunately, we never did.

Mom and Kitten were then handed off to a wildlife officer and taken far, far away from the town and the Open Space land, to a place where, hopefully, they would stay out of trouble. After spending months getting to know this cat, seeing what she was eating, finding the interesting little treasures she left for me, I had to say goodbye.

I may have cried a little. But then, I had just had the most exhausting 2 days of my entire time on the lion project.

The cat came back - Part 1

The next time this lion crossed our radar was a more serious matter. Like I said, it made the news. I wasn't there for some of this story, so I may be fuzzy on the details, but I'll sum it up as best I can.

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.


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When the cougar comes to town

Literally. I may come to town occasionally, but I'm not sure I'm old enough to be classified as a cougar yet.

(By the way, I realize there has been quite a lag in storytelling. I'll try to spend more time here in future.)

Anyway, this is the story about an adult female cougar who liked to frequent a certain Denver suburb a little more often than was generally appreciated by the residents. One of my first experiences with this cat (a female, who shall remain unidentified) was when I hiked into that town to visit one of her GPS points. Her collar battery was getting low, which meant that sometimes her kills wouldn't appear as kills in the database, since they were only represented by a few GPS points instead of many (since her collar would have failed to successfully get as many satellite fixes). In addition, I must point out that smaller kills - like porcupines, raccoons, and the like - generally produce smaller clusters, or even single GPS points, since it doesn't take the lion long to eat the animal.

Because of these facts, I really had no idea what to expect as I approached this GPS cluster that had been randomly selected for me to visit that month. The cluster was located in the middle of this suburban town, along a recreational trail that wound through a heavily-populated neighborhood. Imagine two suburban streets lined by two-story houses, their backyards separated by this lovely bike trail: the fences of one row of houses made up one side of the trail, and on the other, a small creek ran, its banks teeming with willows, aspens, reeds, and tall grasses, then the rear fences of the other row of houses. Near where a bridge connected these two streets, spanning the bike trail and the vegetated riparian strip, lay the GPS cluster.

I parked my official truck on one of the streets and walked to the bridge, hopping down off the edge into the reeds and grasses on the other side of the creek from the bike trail. Technically, I was on public land, but I was keenly aware of the proximity of the properties located feet from me - aware of curious eyes that could be watching me from second-story windows. I didn't have long to hike through the brushy undergrowth before I arrived at the GPS cluster, and quickly identified clumps of thick orange fur clinging here and there. Amidst the carnage, I found the skull of a domestic cat.

Killing domestic cats wasn't a new thing for this cougar; she seemed to have a taste for them. I like cats just fine, and I'm sure that having your beloved pet get devoured by a wild animal is sad, but then again, it shouldn't come as a surprise when you live in cougar country and let your cat roam out of doors at night. As I examined the cat skull, I noticed that one of its upper canine teeth was broken off halfway. I figured it was a result of its being worked over by the teeth of its much larger cousin.

Occasionally, we like to collect some of the remains of kills to help train new technicians on identifying species, so I pulled out a plastic bag and inserted the skull and some orange fur. I filled out the data sheet for the site, gathered my few belongings and the plastic bag, and headed back to the bridge. As I turned the corner to get to my truck, I noticed a sign on a streetlamp that I hadn't noticed on the way in:

LOST CAT. [NAME REMOVED] MALE. ORANGE. MISSING HALF OF UPPER CANINE TOOTH.

Deciding not to call the number on the flyer and inform the owner that his or her cat was no more (after all, it had been 3-4 weeks since the cougar had actually done the deed - I'm sure the owner(s) no longer hoped to see that cat again), I did the next best thing: I pulled down the flyer, put it in the bag with the fur and skull, and presented it to my boss.

I'll admit we had a few laughs over it, but it became a humorous anecdote for my boss and his supervisor to add to the educational talks they gave about cougars: if you have a cat, and you live near the Front Range, don't let it out at night.

That's the first story. When the cat came back to town, it made the news.