In the Lion's Den

One day, I found some mountain lion kittens.

By far, my favorite moments working in the field of wildlife biology have been, and will always be, when I get to see wildlife out doing its thing. When one works primarily with carnivores, this is not a frequent occurrence.

During my time on the mountain lion job in Colorado, I was lucky enough to get a few glimpses of some of our collared cats, as well as an older kitten when I accidentally stumbled upon it (see the post "Here, Kitty"). But what I really wanted was to see kittens in a den. My boss and a tech who was only working part-time for us - which only added insult to injury - had found a den earlier in the season, and I had searched a few likely spots since then but come up empty. 

We usually only checked the den sites to confirm whether or not one of our female cats had had kittens. We weren't cleared to handle them at all - you need special permission from Animal Care and Use committees to do that, apparently. We also had very narrow windows during which to search, as we had to wait until Mama was off hunting, since the last thing we wanted was to stumble upon a very defensive mother mountain lion. The few times I did den searches, we either missed the kittens, or the mother had already moved them. 

I say "miss the kittens" because if you've ever seen a mountain lion den site, you'll understand why it can be so hard to find them. Of the four I had seen, two were located in extremely dense scrub oak thickets, and the other two were in boulder fields. Scrub oak is a species of oak that is short, tough as nails, and grows really close together in enormous groups. You basically have to crawl on your hands and knees underneath the snagging branches to get through it, twisting through it like a labyrinth. Scrub oak destroyed my favorite pair of field pants, for which I have not yet forgiven it. The boulder fields are almost equally annoying, as you have to hop from rock to rock, checking for protected spaces underneath them where a mother might stash kittens, all the while trying not to slip and fall and break your neck. 

As I've said in previous posts, we had GPS locations for all of our cats from their collars, taken every four hours and remotely downloaded; so den sites were usually easy to spot on the maps as an enormous jumble of GPS locations all concentrated in the same general area. But satellite fixes, at least with our technology, are not 100% accurate - depending on the location of the satellites, the position of the cat, the weather, the vegetation, etc., a cat can stay in the same spot for hours and we'll get a map of points sprawled out over maybe a fifty-square-foot area. The kittens could be anywhere in there.

Skunk kill from this cat

And now, I'd like to introduce another star cat, one of my favorites because of her interesting eating habits. She was apparently quite old, and the last time she'd been captured the crew had noticed that her canines were worn almost to stubs. She had had multiple litters of kittens but, to the knowledge of the team, none had ever survived - for some reason, she always abandoned her kittens shortly after giving birth to them. But the most interesting thing about her was the most common prey item I logged for her: skunks. Her data was always easy to collect because I just had to follow my nose, and more often than not it would lead me to a pile of black-and-white hair and little bones, with the occasional intact head or tail sitting amidst it all. Whether her inability to raise young, broken teeth, and taste for skunks were all tied in somehow, maybe to a brain injury or other deformity this cat had, we could never be certain. 

It became clear late in the winter that something was going on - whether she was injured or had kittens, we weren't sure. All we knew was that she was sticking around a particular area for a long, long time. It seemed an odd time for her to have had kittens, but then again Colorado lions don't seem to stick to a regular breeding schedule - they can have their kittens year-round. 

And so, one day, I was instructed to go with another technician to investigate. 

At first, it was an easy hike. The other tech and I - an older, seasoned guy who had worked with lions for decades - drove as far as we could over a rough two-track road, then walked the rest of the way, along a creek and around a gently-rising hill. It didn't take long, however, before the trail ended at a massive boulder field. Below, we could see enormous rocks littering the hillside, the area devoid of almost all vegetation except for a tiny oasis of scrubby trees and shrubs in the very middle of it. We had to backtrack and hike over some pretty sketchy stuff to get down into it. We clambered over the boulders as best we could, and all the while I checked the mother lion's telemetry to make sure she wasn't in the area; we were able to hear her signal, but it was very weak, clearly indicating that she was far across the valley below.

It took a long time but we finally reached the trees in the middle. We were in the middle of the big jumble of GPS points, most of which were concentrated, of course, around the boulder field. I balked at the task before us; it was going to take ages to search under the rocks. I briefly considered giving up. After all, the kittens were probably gone or dead, and I had learned from experience that trying to find these guys in this kind of situation was like - pardon the cliche - trying to find a needle in a haystack.

However, Nature itself, this time, came to my aid.

From startlingly nearby, I heard a shrill whistle. It sounded completely out of place in this barren, silent landscape. I thought maybe my coworker had made the noise, but when I looked at him, his eyes had gone wide. "Kittens!" he said.

"What?" I said. Surely mountain lion kittens didn't whistle.

But the whistling continued, and as I was closer, I scrambled over the enormous boulders, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound. When I stood atop a particularly gigantic rock, looking down at a little patch of soil separating it from its neighboring rocks, a slight movement caught my eye.

A mountain lion kitten, days old, crawled out from under the boulder, its ears and eyes still shut, its fur speckled with little black spots. In between its whistles, we could hear the whistling of a sibling, still concealed beneath the rock. The visible kitten groped blindly in the dirt for just a few seconds before heading back toward the safety of the den.

I couldn't believe my luck. I had finally seen a mountain lion kitten.

Click on the video below from the Cincinnati Zoo for some examples of the sound.

The whistling is the kittens' method of communicating with their mother, and I heard it later, from the Golden lion's kitten ("The Cat Came Back - Part II"). It's certainly not the sound you would expect to come from a cat. I was glad the little kittens had done it, though, or we probably never would have found them.

Unfortunately, the crazy mother did abandon them, as her behavior over the next few weeks didn't indicate she was still supporting kittens. And so, a little while later, I brought my boss Kevin to the site to see if we could find them.

We made the difficult journey back to the site, and I lowered myself down into the space between the boulders to dig around in the dirt. It didn't take long for me to find little bones and poofs of spotted kitten fur. Kevin even got down and crawled as deep into the den as he could go, which was pretty deep (see pictures).

See if you can find his shoes

So, it was kind of a sad story, as the kittens didn't make it; but these things happen, and I'm not sure I would have felt better if we had had ACUC permission to rescue the kittens and bring them back to Fort Collins. There, they would have grown up in a pen (if they survived at all), then probably been translocated out in the woods again to fend for themselves. Some lions can thrive in those circumstances, it's true. At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, since I love seeing wildlife up close and getting the chance to touch and smell and hear the animals while processing them at capture, it's always best to interfere with these animals' lives as little as possible.

Nature can be harsh, yes. Mothers abandon their young for reasons we don't understand. Animals take the lives of other animals to survive. Even though I love carnivores, and I myself eat meat occasionally, whenever I'm watching a documentary of a wolf or a pride of lions chasing down its prey, I find myself rooting for the chased, the underdog, the victim. We find ourselves empathizing with creatures, allotting human rights and qualities to them, finding sadness in tragedies such as these. Some people think it's in our nature as humans to fear the wilderness and all its ferocity, its untamedness, its danger, to want to distance ourselves from this life-and-death struggle that goes on outside our cities.

But is our fear of wilderness in our nature? Or do we fear it because we have lost our nature?