Photo by Stephen Trimble
Wild in the City
A cougar’s view from the Oquirrhs
By Stephen Trimble
UNDER A SKEIN OF STARS, between the startling shadows cast by a nearly full moon, cougar Number 12 rises from the oak brush and moves up the draw, checking the deer paths. Her 5-month-old kittens are hungry. She has left the pair sleeping together, tucked into the snow, while she stalks through the moonlit glades. She makes paw prints the size of a fist.
Number 12 knows these canyons and foothills well. She has lived here in the southernmost reaches of the Salt Lake Valley for 10 years, rearing litter after litter to adulthood. She works the brushy benches at Camp Williams, the National Guard training ground below the Oquirrh Mountains, following small draws down to the Jordan River Narrows. She needs to kill a deer every week to 10 days—more often when she has kittens. She moves with the deer, often crossing Redwood Road, a busy thoroughfare teeming with commuter traffic. Hunting through the night, retreating deep into brush by day, it is easy to cast her as the charismatic symbol of wilderness—an elegant, mysterious phantom.
She wears two leather collars, one with a GPS unit, one with a tracking transmitter. She has worn them for six of her 10 years. When researchers capture her on January 8 this year to download her GPS data record and change batteries, they notice her worn teeth. She’s old now. But they’d noticed the same wear last year and she’d survived.
Number 12 hunts uphill from the Jordan River. Her kittens, too young still to fend for themselves, wait.
ON A RIDGE WITHIN SIGHT of freshly paved cul-de-sacs, David Stoner kneels in a creek bed, close under the oak brush, and teaches me how to identify a lion kill. He holds up a shoulder blade from a scatter of deer bones half-covered by sun-warmed duff. Cougars take down deer with a suffocating bite to the neck, their jaws wrapping around to bring those big canine teeth through the shoulder—leaving a telltale hole as the teeth pierce the scapula. Stoner checks each bone for tooth marks that reveal the cougar’s eating plan, which aims for the most calories. “The lion will break long bones and lick out the marrow, and open the skull and eat the brains,” he says.
Bearded, methodical, and tireless, costumed in the battered, wide-brimmed hat and rumpled outdoor clothing favored by the field scientist, Stoner is a lion tracker. He works for one of the longest continuously running mountain lion studies in North America, a program out of Logan’s Utah State University. Now from the ridge at South Mountain, we look out over a living mosaic of city and suburb, home to a million people, a classically Western juxtaposition of tree-lined neighborhoods replacing the desert, with forest wilderness just over the backyard fence.
We scare up several mule deer, which bounce up through the oaks and junipers and over the summit of South Mountain at the boundary with Camp Williams. Twenty-five thousand acres of military land roll away to the south of us—closed to the public. Like so many military reservations in the United States, Camp Williams has become an unofficial and ironic wildlife refuge. With all the bombing and shooting, frequent fires mimic the natural burn regime. Green shoots come up two weeks after fire, and the deer thrive on this tender vegetation. Winter is off-season for military training exercises and prime season for wintering wildlife.
Stoner points his GPS unit to the skies, and satellites guide us to the positions he has plotted on his clipboard. The 39-year-old PhD candidate has mapped locations recorded from a cougar’s GPS radio collar. When these sites cluster, the lion is staying put for several days; the mean of that cluster should lead to a kill.
When we scramble into a drainage and walk to the point indicated on his GPS, right there, on the exact spot of his mean, is the scatter of deer bones. “Cougar Number 18 killed this deer on the night of March 22 and 23, 2006. She stayed here till March 31st,” Stoner says matter-of-factly. Stoner appreciates the lions as individuals, but data inform his careful delivery: “Number 18 has been on the air for five years; she loves this drainage, but she uses 60 to 75 square kilometers. ”
Since 1995, the project has radio-collared 170 cougars, most of the population in the study area during those 12 years. Cougars range from British Columbia to Patagonia. In the United States, centuries of hunting and habitat fragmentation have eliminated them from all but 14 of the lower 48 states. A small female weighs 80 pounds, a large male over 200. They live on deer whenever possible (one of their many names, besides cougar, mountain lion, and puma, is the “deer tiger”). “Cougars aren’t just eating machines,” Stoner says. “These animals have just as complex a society as humans.” Stoner makes a heartfelt case, but no one really knows the details. “We can’t speak their language—but our inability to measure their thinking, their memory, their foresight, doesn’t mean these behaviors don’t exist.”
WHAT DOES THE PROSPECT of increasing subdivisions mean to a cougar? David Stoner answers laconically: “It complicates relations.” Each new season of building takes out groves of Gambel oak, diminishes winter deer range, and decreases habitat for cougars.
Fifty thousand people live immediately adjacent to Camp Williams in Bluffdale, Herriman, Saratoga Springs, and Eagle Mountain. In addition, new housing plans are on the table around the Kennecott mine. The mining company (a subsidiary of the international Rio Tinto Group) owns more than 90,000 acres in the northeast Oquirrhs. As the company shifts from mining to real estate, planners project an additional 200,000 citizens living in the west side of the Salt Lake valley.
About 15 cougars at a time work the territory of the unofficial wildlife refuge created by Camp Williams, Kennecott lands, and the Bureau of Land Management acres on the steep western side of the Oquirrh range. The cats range across astonishingly large landscapes. One radio-collared male roamed across the urbanized valley between the Oquirrhs and the Wasatch Mountains and took up residence behind Mount Timpanogos near Sundance. A female wandered more than 800 miles, from the Oquirrhs to Richfield, Utah, and then north into Wyoming and back down into Colorado, where she was killed by hunters near Meeker—and the biologists recovered her collar with the record of her remarkable journey.
Cougars living on the borders of towns nearly always keep to themselves. Just 18 people have died in cougar attacks in North America in the last century; the same number of Americans died from dog bites in a single recent year, 2002. So far, there have been no problems with direct human-cougar contact in Utah. But Tom Becker, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources biologist whose territory includes the Oquirrhs, worries.
With rapid development on private land, the biologists can’t manage the deer. And with no cougar hunting in the Oquirrhs or on Camp Williams, each year young cougars go looking for their own territories. Where are they going to go? “Downtown,” predicts Becker, “where they will prey on pets.” As “nuisance” animals, they are either killed or taken back to the mountains, where the cougar territories are already spoken for.
Ann Neville, Kennecott’s staff wildlife biologist, pledges to embrace the needs of wildlife: “We aren’t planning real far out. We have time to assess repercussions.”
Becker acknowledges a full spectrum of attitudes toward mountain lions. “People who are retired think it could be neat to have a cougar walking through their back yard. If you have a bunch of kids, that could be petrifying.”
He advises people moving into new mountain homes to coexist with the outdoors. It’s all about education. If you have horses, protect your haystack. Control your garbage. Don’t treat animals like they are pets. Live among them, but don’t feed them.
The alternative, points out David Stoner’s boss at Utah State University, wildlife biologist Michael Wolfe, is “ethnic cleansing.” By that, he means preemptively removing the lions or their food source, the deer. Not only is this unlikely in a culture that loves the romance of big predators, but, as Wolfe notes, you’ll never find all the lions. They are too big, too wild.
DAVID STONER USES EVERY available window into the mind of the cougar, including his own pets: “House cats are basically miniature cougars.” Like house cats, cougar kittens play with their mother’s tail. They frolic and threaten, but more than anything, both the big cats and the little ones fascinate us with their self-reliance and self-possession.
Female housecats go into heat, and the neighboring toms gather. In cougar society, males compete for females, as well, killing each other, killing and eating kittens, presumably so the female will come back into heat and they can sire their own offspring.
Some cougar families specialize in elk hunting. It’s a hazardous challenge particularly for the females, who weigh only as much as a large-sized dog. The elk-hunting mothers pass down to the kittens the skills for how to bring down a 700-pound animal.
The GPS collars yield astonishing data we could have in no other way, yet we still know so little. Maintaining funding for a research study that needs a good stock of $4,000 cougar collars is a perpetual problem. Each year’s work, each collar, gives us new data.
A female and her dependent kittens form the core of the cougar population—an old female like Number 12 and her daughters overlapping one another in territory. They know one another, so they are not aggressive. This establishes social bonds. The males are solitary and wander more. Eighty percent of the collared cougars are female.
David Stoner dreams of a holistic view of the animal to which he has committed his professional life. Tracking and trapping their way through the years, this team of researchers is learning as much as anyone about the secrets of cougars.
McLAIN MECHAM LOOKS LIKE the mountain man that he is, bearded, flinty-eyed, a master of mules and hounds and rickety horse trailers, as well as warm, witty, outdoorsman banter. Mecham’s dad, Stan, is a legendary houndsman. His older brother, Clint, traps cougars for the Utah State research team on Monroe Mountain, near Richfield, where the lion population has been hunted for decades.
Mecham killed only one mountain lion, when he was 16. “After you’ve done the research, you have a change of heart,” he says—even while acknowledging that he believes you need the balance of hunting, too.
Mecham has tracked and trapped and photographed lions for 23 years now. For four months every winter, Mecham travels from his home in Tropic, Utah, to work with Stoner. Driving back and forth from southern Utah, looking up to the ridgelines that border the highway, he can spot tracks while barreling along in his truck at highway speed. He knows where to look; he knows what to expect. He sees the Utah mountains and deserts as home—for himself and his family as well as a parallel society of deer and elk, coyote and bobcat, bear and cougar—a place with mountains still wild enough for healthy habitat, webs of biodiversity, mysteries and connections hidden within the landscape for a little while longer.
Cougars cover a lot of ground every night. The odds of crossing a road are high. So the team circles the roads, hoping for fresh tracks that will let them plot a location. Then Mecham turns loose his hounds.
That’s just what we did one cold, clear, snowy morning at Camp Williams. With trucks and ATVs, we drove the roads, seeing lots of deer, but only 3-day-old cougar tracks. Mecham took off on his mule, looking for fresh tracks, but found none. His conclusion: The lion must be holed up on a kill somewhere.
When I joined the lion team a second time, we had better luck. Mecham had trapped a kitten the day before, one of cougar Number 12’s—“an old, old lion and a smart old girl,” according to Mecham. Mecham and the biologists circled a brushy ridge no more than a half mile from Redwood Road, listening to the radio frequencies beamed from the lions’ collars. Mecham was pretty sure that Number 12 and her two kittens were on the slope dropping down to Beef Hollow, so he sent us to the west side of the ridge while he rode his mule up and over from the east, figuring to scare up the lions.
Our job was to turn loose the dogs if the lions broke. Mecham appeared on the ridgeline and worked his way down, listening to the signal from the kitten’s new ear transmitter grow stronger. He came to a fresh deer kill—broken sagebrush, drag marks, blood spattered on the snow, a carcass concealed under snow and oak branches.
And then—there she was, a rangy arc of muscle moving through the brush. An assistant on the project loosed Spot the hound. The cougar loped across the road. Spot followed. The lion recrossed the road, the dog baying and following, and when Mecham caught up with them, the cougar had the dog on the ground next to a culvert opening. She abandoned the dog and quickly retreated into the culvert—just where Mecham wanted her.
The lion stayed put in the culvert, more fearful than aggressive. Mecham methodically loaded his gun with anesthetic darts while the culvert pipe amplified a deep-throated and affronted purr. Mecham tossed a rope around her and tugged her out into the snow. Cougar Number 12 was soon immobilized but certainly not asleep. The team worked with her the way they would handle a calf while branding, wrestling with the cougar, kneeling on her, tugging on her tail when she staggered up, throwing a coat over her head to quiet her.
Batteries successfully replaced in her collar, the lion-wrestlers turned the cougar loose. Still drunk on the drug, she flopped through the oaks, trying to get away. I was able to photograph her, periodically retreating a few paces when she headed directly at me. This was my first sight of a lion, and I reveled in her intense gaze, in the milky wildness in those amber-rimmed eyes. When we were ready to leave, Mecham herded her back into the culvert, the perfect recovery room.
Over the years I’ve become cheerfully obsessed with the possibility of cougars. I’ve hiked in wild country across the West for 40 years and have never seen one. I’ve fantasized about lanky lions drifting through my headlights when I drive back roads late at night. I’ve looked for tracks in the southern Utah snow, in the sandy bottoms of washes. I’m thrilled with this moment—looking down the dark pipe of the culvert at the dark rumbling silhouette with feline ears, thoroughly wild even when chased into this culvert by hounds.
TEN DAYS LATER, on the night of January 18, cougar Number 12 ambled up to the paved lanes of Redwood Road. In her maturity, she was losing a little of her quickness, and this made the crossing more dangerous. She was also finding hunting more strenuous; at this point in her life, she wouldn’t turn down a road-killed deer, but to find one meant searching along the thoroughfare. And traffic had increased in these past years, as more and more commuters passed by at dusk and dawn—just when she found herself in need of crossing the road in her travels.
A vehicle came barreling through the dark. She hesitated. And then she sprang across the road, instinctively fleeing from human contact, from the threat of the speeding vehicle.
A passing automobile clipped her head. Number 12 fell to the side of the road, and quickly bled to death. The next morning a Division of Wildlife Resources officer found her and reported her death to David Stoner, who collected her body for analysis. The biologists will add her death—and her cause of death, the fourth traffic fatality in 12 years—to their data.
Number 12’s kittens may starve. They may also be able to survive off the plentiful rabbits along the river until they grow just a little older and can kill deer. Mecham will keep an eye on them, listening for the signal from the ear transmitter he attached to the kitten he trapped.
By summer, the society of cougars in the Oquirrh Mountains in the Great Basin of Utah will have rearranged itself to accommodate new lions living in new places, and the world will spin us all toward another winter.
Salt Lake City writer and photographer Stephen Trimble has been dreaming of mountain lions for decades. He was
thrilled to spend enough time in the field with Utah State University biologists to hear their good stories, and to have the chance to photograph cougar Number 12.
