National Parks Traveler Podcast | California Mountain Lions

National Parks Traveler Podcast | California Mountain Lions

Welcome to National Parks traveler where we explore the national parks and the issues that involve Them Mountain lines are an incredibly charismatic animal on landscapes within and adjacent to the National Park system but they’re seldom seen because of their nocturnal Tendencies this is Kurt repen your host at the national parks traveler there recently was a new report that focused on a comprehensive estimate of

Mountain lines in California and the number is much smaller than many had thought it was to discuss California’s Mountain line population and efforts to protect that population Our Guest today is Dr Veronica yovich a conservation scientist at panthera the global Wildcat conservation organization we’ll be back in a minute with Dr

Yovich the Blue rdge Parkway found Foundation is the primary nonprofit fundraising partner for the Blue Ridge Parkway it is made up of people who have a deep love for this Majestic Road and want to ensure that its natural beauty and the experiences it offers endure for generations to come show your

Appreciation at BRP foundation.org full of stunning photography and thought-provoking reads Smokey’s life is a biannual magazine produced by Great Smoky Mountains Association members receive it free of charge each spring and and it is available for purchase in retail stores throughout Great Smokey Mountains National Park and online at Smoky information.org Welcome to the traveler Veronica thank you you know it’s great to have you here and and Mountain lines are you know one of those charismatic megaphon that a lot of people seem really interested in and you know this latest report that the the mountain line population in California

Is is not as big as people had thought it was that that’s kind of alarming I mean what what are the latest numbers yeah so previously um people thought that the numbers were somewhere in the 5,000 to 7,000 range I believe and it’s been downgraded to between 3,200 and

4,500 so that’s that’s significantly lower than previous estimates that were based on habitat availability and these new numbers are based on uh much finer scale research has the the habitat decreased earlier we thought that the the state of California had somewhere on the order of 6,000 mountain lions and

New research uh suggest the number is actually closer to 3200 to 4500 mountain lions so that’s significantly lower than we previously thought and is that primarily due to loss of habitat yeah so a lot of that is because the previous model was based on habitat suitability so the state

Researchers looked at the habitat that was available and estimated Puma density according to how much space there was um the new data that has come out more recently is much finer resolution so they used a lot more nuanced tools to make that estimate and probably there well certainly there’s a lot less

Habitat available to Mountain lies than they’re used to to be mountain lions need uh large Open Spaces that are relatively free of human development they’re not Wilderness obligates but they need uh Open Spaces with no development or very low density human development to survive and so as our

Human population expands which it is in California it’s growing quite a lot uh that shrinks the habitat that’s available from outlines yeah I was just wondering how adaptable they are I mean and I live in in Northern Utah um the Park City area and certainly you know there’s lots of

Forest forested areas around where we live but you know in the winter time heavy snows the deer come down and there have been a number of people in the general vicinity where I live whose um you know ring doorbells or their trail cameras have have picked up uh Lions

Walking through their backyards past their front porches yeah this is one of the really interesting things about uh studying Mountain lines now is it’s really changed from how we used to do it a few decades ago because we have things like ring cameras and really good Wildlife cameras so those motion

Sensitive camera traps that researchers deploy out in the field we have a much better ability to observe and uh interact indirectly with animals like mountain lions in ways that we couldn’t in the past and so it in some ways from a human perspective it seems like the mountain line population is growing

Because there’s more people so there’s higher chances of people interacting with whatever mountain lions are out there because we have more sort of mountain lion detectors in these humans out on the landscape and we have the ability to observe them when we aren’t there with ring cameras and Wildlife

Cameras and so um we have a lot more ability to interact whether that’s directly or indirectly and those indirect dete and interactions are are really increasing with with the technology that we have to observe them now on top of that we also have social media and so

When anybody observes a mount lion you can uh send that information around immediately and so everybody vicariously has that indirect interaction so those those things combined um make it seem like the population is really changing in a way that that the biology probably doesn’t support yeah interesting

California is a big state um did did that the latest research in calculating the population show any um you know Pockets where there are greater populations of lions in previously or areas where the the populations have flattened out I mean you look across the Sierra Nevada the Mojave Desert you know

Right so in the Mojave um they they didn’t detect the there were areas where they didn’t detect any mountain lions um but in other places like Humble County the population is actually doing quite well those are some of the the higher areas for Mountain lies what about the

Sequoia Kings Canyon Y national park areas that’s a good question I’m sure that uh the research would have something to say about that I don’t know specifically about those areas uh based on my experience going to those places I would say that there’s good habitat for them

There so I would I would be surprised and you know you’ve got those large protected areas that should make it even better habitat for mountain lions so they they should do pretty well there I wonder if you would run into the problems with um overlap of territories and inner species

Aggression yeah and in places where the mountain Li population is doing really well you’ll start to see some self-regulation in the population where territories will butt up against one another and um and you can see conspecific Strife so mountain lions fighting other Mountain lines or you can

See things like infanticide where a male comes in and kills off his neighboring M’s Offspring or um you’ll see decreases in in birth rates and that’s how mountain lions uh equilibrate their population with what the habitat can actually hold yeah yeah interesting stuff um now you mentioned earlier that

You know part of the problem is loss of habitat human population we keep spreading out and ruining all these beautiful places what what about natural disasters like the the recent wildfires that have been in the news in California the past two or three years are they detrimental to line habitat or do the

Lines just cope with it that’s a very good question uh on an evolutionary time scale mountain lines did co-evolve with forest fire they they live in a lot of different environments where fire is a natural part of the system and so they have tools to deal with fires and some

Of those tools could be shifting their habitat use to move into an area that’s not currently burning while a fire burns through another part of their home range sometimes they’ll move out of their home range altogether and go to a place that’s safer um or they can dodge the

Fire on a micro scale as it burns through now with fire as it is now we have these giant mega fires which is not what they evolved for so certainly that can be really detrimental to them in a bunch of different ways it can displace them into areas that aren’t burning

Where people live and then you can see an increase in human Wildlife conflict or it can burn important resources that their prey need and so there’s there’s definitely repercussions they can also be in the path of the fire themselves and and perish that way um we’ve unfortunately we’ve seen this is

Getting a little Grim but we’ve seen Pumas that um have walked through burned areas and will burn their paws right and be injured that way and it’s it’s definitely it’s a very different environment from how they evolves and definitely causes problems for them now when you’re you’re talking about a drop

In in population of an apex predator how does that affect the the the food chain so to speak downhill I mean in Yellowstone you go back to the early 1900s and um wolves are bad and grizzly bears are bad and we’re going to kill them out and um part of the

Response was you know burgeoning elk herds or burgeoning you know mule deer herds have we seen any of that related to the mountain line um population decrease in California yeah it hasn’t been studied quite so clearly as the the Yellowstone model but there was a paper that was

Published just a couple years ago that explored lots of different ecological implications for uh for mountain lion loss you know the a lot of different it explored a lot of different biological relationships that center around mountain lion activity and so you see some of the same the same issues that

We’ve seen in Yellowstone where Mountain lies influence their their prey and the there are influences that trickle down through the environment um some of my dissertation work looked at how humans displace mountain lions and that influences where deer brows and what we saw was that deers spend more time in

Places with humans using humans as a shield against predation and browse down the plants uh in those human adjacent areas and that can actually change the plant architecture so plants that grow farther away from humans um where there’s more Puma activity more mountain Li activity are less browsed and so they grow longer

And uh more sort of attenuated like taller whereas plants near humans where the Pumas have been uh displaced and the deer brows more are Stumpy with uh denser branches because they have higher herbivory pressure the deer are browsing on the more um and and stunting their

Growth and for people who um who live in those those areas with uh with deer like the urban Wildland adjacent areas have probably noticed sort of pyramid shaped bushes um where they’re heavily browsed by deer or sometimes you can notice on oak trees well there’ll be a line about

Six feet tall where all the branches under six feet tall have been browsed off and then the tree grows um as as it read normally would above that browse line that’s pretty interesting you know I’m going to mention a book you’ve probably heard about it being in in Fort Collins um

Beast in the garden um it’s probably been a decade or so since it came out it it was a um case study out of Boulder Colorado I believe where you know you had all these homeowners and they wanted beautiful gardens and trees and vegetation and so they planted all this

Stuff and of course that brought the the deer down into the boulder neighborhoods and where the prey is the Predator will follow and so you had Mountain lines at least one mountain line come down and a young teenager was killed unfortunately um while out on a a training

Run are we seeing that in in California you know we’re talking about um a decrease in habitat and so are they coming down and across that Urban interface that wild Urban interface into urban areas this is another really interesting question and um there’s a research group out of UC

Santa Cruz that studying just that uh so this uh group at UC Santa Cruz is looking at human mountainline interactions in the Bay Area and um whether we can use behavioral modification to segregate human activity and mountainline activity and what I mean by that is they’re

Studying space use Puma space use in uh open space preserves so protected habitat and um and whether they can use uh adversive conditioning to encourage Pumas to use areas away from High human activity areas so what they’re doing is they’re trying to um to train the mountain lies to stay away from places

That people frequent sure um because that is something that we’re wondering about there are you know in general you don’t see a lot of human Mountain line interactions right it’s it’s very different from other they are very different from other species like you can go to Yellowstone and see wolves you

Can see Grizzlies elk bison all sorts of Critters but there’s really nowhere in the US where you can go and view mountain lions right they’re much more cryptic species in general so there um they there are places there are very small hot spots where you do tend to see

A bit more human mountainline interactions Boulder is one of those places there’s some areas in Southern California where there have been a couple uh incidents with mountain lions and there’s a spot in the Bay Area where there have been a couple incidents it’s not a ton um but there have been more

Than you would expect and more than you see in other places and so what they’re studying is is whether there’s tools whether what what kinds of tools we can use to train Mountain lies to stay away from people basically yeah it’s interesting um I digress a bit a year

And a half two years ago um we were down in Northern New Mexico working on some stories and we got into the Santa Fe National Forest after Sundown and we were driving to a campground this was late uh October early November in a mountain line walked in front of our car

It was just uh pretty cool you don’t see see that too often you don’t and I so I do get to hear a lot of mountain lion sighting stories uh working on mountain lions you definitely pull those out of people um and most of the stories go the

Same way where somebody saw a mountain line they weren’t sure what it was until they saw the tail until they saw the back end because the mountain line was running away from them and that is how the vast majority of interactions go it’s you know they are cats and so they

Are in apparently idiosyncratic but most of the interactions end with the mountain lion running away and actually there was a a research project done Years Ago by two Puma researchers who worked on on Mountain lines uh all over the American West and they had a lot of Close Encounters where they were tracking

Mountain lions and so they were able to document their experiences cheating right they had callers on the mountain lines and they were hiking to them to see what they were to to to do their research and they were able to document something like 281 Close Quarters interactions with human

Groups ranging from 2 to eight and what they found was the vast majority of the time the Puma ran away yeah um there were times when the the Puma did you know the sort of cat thing where it just sat there and looked at them right in

That that same way that your house cat will do um but in no in none of those interactions did they get attacked right they there’s the chances of getting attacked are very very low even if the cat doesn’t run away which is what’s going to happen most of the time usually

It just sort of sits there and looks at you until you make an exit yeah yeah well in our situation it just kind of walked across the road right you know in front of us had a collar on we could see that saw a long tail and he just

Disappeared into the forest very cool very cool sighting this is Kurt Reen with national parks traveler we’re talking today with Dr Verona yovich a conservation scientist at p Thea the global Wildcat conservation organization we’re talking about Mountain lines in California and recent studies that show a decline in population we’re going to

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Started federally insured by Ncua so Veronica um in terms of the decline in in California is any of it related to to livestock predation where you know the the Rancher the farmer you know is trying to protect his his herds yeah certainly that is a big issue for mountain lions so in California up until

Recently um well I should back up so uh Californians decided to protect mountain lions even though Mountain lines are designated a least concerned species so they’re they’re common um they’re not threatened Californians valued having an apex predator on their landscape and wanted to make sure the mountain lions

Remained in perpetuity so they passed prop 117 that protected mountain lions and removed our made it so that we couldn’t hunt them so that it’s illegal to to shoot them for any reason unless they threaten your personal safety or the safety of your livestock and companion animals um now within that

There’s that space made for livestock producers who need to protect their their livestock and people do use the those permits that that permission uh to protect their livestock and on average about a 100 Pumas are killed every year under what’s called those depredation permits uh now in 2020 I believe the

Center for biological diversity and a bunch of other groups petitioned for mountain lions to receive protect status and once that petition was submitted um they received basically endangered species Protections in certain distinct population segments in California so in the Santa Ana Mountains and the Santa Monica Mountains and the Santa Cruz

Mountains those areas were identified as places where the population is shrinking and in danger of going locally extinct and so 50 years yeah that yeah for they they tied that specifically to the Southern California population that’s right um and so those areas get special protections now and um so in those areas

The strategy is to help prevent conflict before it happens really which we should be doing any anywhere that mountain lions and livestock coexist right um but there’s a special focus in those areas so what’s being done to to help the the livestock producers protect their livestock from the mountain

Lines there’s some neat research projects that are popping up to help uh the state agency have science-based information to give to livestock producers so not a lot of research has been done on livestock protection and mountain lions specifically so um we’ve got our new panthera base uh research

Project called Bay clip the Bay Area carnivore livestock interactions project that is focused on the central coast and is testing different livestock protection tools to help ranchers know what tools are effective and what contexts they’re effective and how to best deploy them so that when the California Department of Fish and

Wildlife folks go in after um maybe after there’s been an incident or if we’re a livestock producer that’s concerned about livestock protection issues and we can help arm them with good information uh to help those producers most effectively and we also uh work with with uh extension to get

The the message out to uh relevant livestock producers I believe there there’s some new tools that have come out um Fox lights and and turbo flry installations what yeah uh these are are some some of the promising tools livestock Guardian dogs are a very old tool um that seem to be very effective

And then there’s new tools like Fox s so these are these devices um that as the name would suggest for developed to reduce Fox predation but may work on other species as well it’s a light that you set out um out in your grazing areas you can put them on the perimeter of

Your fence and have a string of like multiple lights set up and they go on at dusk so at sundown um and are active all night until the sun comes back up again which is of course when carnivores are most active and they flash randomly colored lights in random directions at

Random intervals and the idea here is that carnivores in general don’t like novel environments they don’t like new things and so this light is a completely foreign new unpleasant stimulus that uh that discourages them from from coming into a certain area and the Turbo flre what is that the

Turbo flager is also a new Twist on a very old tool it’s a a line of polywire um like a cord of polywire that’s electrified with these flags that hang down these rectangular flags at regular intervals I think it it’s around 11 inches between between flags and they

Flap in the breeze and again create that sort of Novel unpleasant psychological barrier and the the cord itself is electrified so if a puma or a coyote um decides to test they get used to the flags themselves they decide to test that boundary and they explore the world

In general sort of nose first then they’ll be um they’ll get a a non-injured but unpleasant shock um when they try and investigate that flager and this is it’s actually it’s an interesting story because it’s a really old tool that used to be used for Wolf

Hunting in Europe and what they would do is they’d string up flager that wasn’t electrified just plain old flager and they funnel wolves through um and then as the Wolves came out the funnel end they would kill them and so it’s a neat tool that’s been turned on its head and

Now it’s being used to protect wolves and livestock is is one more effective than the other the fox lights versus the the fla Ray installations that’s exactly what our research is trying to figure out I have a feeling that that tools that um that actually deliver a a penalty for

Trespass so like the turbo flry has that electrified you know unpleasant component will probably be more effective than something like a flashing light but uh but that’s one of the things we’re we’re going to figure out uh with with this research project yeah interesting although I wonder um will

You have to deal with Brakes in the line I know my yeah every tool right every tool have its own limitations its own investment that you have to make you know whether that’s Financial or time you know time setting up in the first place and maintaining it they they all

Have their own benefits and drawbacks and really the best um the best protected livestock will probably have some sort of combination of tools or tools that rotate through because carnivores are out there 247 and they’re they’re very smart and um and they learn uh about what what’s going on in their

Landscape so you’ll probably have to shift things on them so that they don’t get too used to any one tool yeah yeah now a little earlier you’d mentioned um about the the cat population in the Santa Monica in the Santa Ana mountains and you know the projection that if

Nothing is done that there’s a one and4 chance that the mountain lines could be extinct in those areas um do we know exactly or close to exactly how many mountain lines are in the the Santa Monica Mountains population I’m not sure um the researchers who work down in that area

Specifically probably have a pretty good idea of what that number is but I’m afraid I don’t know what that is yeah I know there’s been a lot of concern in recent years um in part because of the wildfires that have swept through the Santa Montica mountains um and the NRA

Down there at the national recreation area but of course the the presence of the 101 freeway that comes down there and and the impediment it um poses for for lines trying to um explore new territories or or just move about in in the the surrounding territories yeah the the mountain lions

Living in Southern California have multiple threats right so they’ve got habitat loss from development they’ve got um a lot of high-speed uh hard to Cross Roads that crisscross uh a lot of Southern California they’ve got wildfires and those those mega fires that pose a threat they also have um there’s a lot

Of rodenticide down there which is a huge threat and so with with all of those multiple threats going on you see pockets of mountain lines that are becoming isolated from one other from one another and suffer from inbreeding depression right so there’s there’s a lot of different forces working against

Mountain lines in Southern California yeah any prediction on on how the the Wallace anenberg Wildlife Crossing Wildlife bridge over the 101 will um impact line populations in that area I mean there’s there’s lots of millions of dollars going into building that um at the same time there’s that one and four

Chance that the the cats could be extinct in 50 years would that Wildlife Bridge um be a big help to to line populations that down in that region it could make all the difference it could make all the difference between Extinction and perseverance so in general um it doesn’t actually take that

Much gene flow to keep a population viable um I don’t know what the exact number for that is in Southern California but um for other places it’s been something on the order of one animal uh moving between populations and sex and successfully reproducing every couple years right it’s it it doesn’t

Need to be it doesn’t need to create a whole new wildlife highway to make a huge difference so I would think that that that that Wildlife Crossing structure could be a a wonderful Boon to the population there yeah yeah yeah it’ll be interesting to to see how that

Goes can we cross the country to to Southern Florida and and talk for just a few minutes about the the Florida panther situation down there I you know I know it’s it’s been a great problem for for many years uh you could go back to when they were so concerned about

Inbreeding problems that they brought in some Mountain lines or cougars depending on your vernacular from Texas to to help improve the gene flow but ever since then the PO population has you know been kind of hanging around 200 individuals maybe a little more maybe a little less

The fish and wildlife service has never really designated critical habitat in South Florida for for Florida Panthers we’ve got Road collisions that are killing um the Panthers every year there’s some inner species aggression because the habitat is so squeezed can can you tell us anything about the outlook for the Florida

Panther yeah the the main way that I use the the Florida panther in my own work uh in California is as a cautionary tale um so the Florida panther is is a really interesting case study because this is a population of mountain lions that was always there it’s not a reintroduced

Population it’s a Remnant population and it’s become more and more and more isolated uh Mountain lines used to be widespread across the entirety of the us and that is uh is their only population that remains uh in the east coast and the nearest neighboring population is actually in

Texas and like you mentioned when uh the population had gotten down to I think around 100 individuals and was really suffering from inbreeding depression so the the buildup of unfortunate genes in that SM small population they were seeing um health issues like kinked tails and heart defects and uh defective

Sperm and so they brought uh a puma in from the closest population from Texas let her have a couple litter of kittens and that was enough to um to sort of reset the genetic the genetic stock in in Florida and and help rescue that population but um yeah I mean what it

Really needs is to be a part of a connected neighboring population in order to be able to to really survive and be self uh perpetuating in perpetuity so that the population really it is quite small and um and that cautionary tail element is is a parallel for what could happen in these

Populations in California so in the Santa Cruz mountains or the Santa anas or the Santa Monas you can look to Florida for what happens when the population gets isolated like that as for the Florida population itself it’s going to take a lot of management in order to to keep those Critters on the

Map right right you know we’re talking about expansion of uh territory or connecting two different populations it wasn’t too many years ago I believe um that the um Eastern Mountain line in the you know New Jersey Pennsylvania New York area I believe was declared extinct that no longer existed and so while from

Time to time there are disperses from that Florida panther um population going north there’s nothing up there for them to go to yeah and so this is this is somewhat encouraging that the the Eastern front of the western population of Mount lines does seem to be expanding East right so

It’s we’re seeing more individuals uh leave the Western population and strike strike out east to see what they can find um and uh and the population could potentially recover itself it could recolonize on its own as long as we we don’t get in their way basically um we at penther we

Published a paper recently that identified habitat patches on the East Coast that would be suitable for mountainline recolonization so these are areas that are sufficiently large to have a popul a self-sustaining uh population for some period of time there’s sufficient prey there’s low enough human density and by

By that I mean roads and houses and livestock and there are actually quite a number of uh of good habitat patches that if Mountain lines could make their way East um could potentially set up populations and and recolonize the East which would be very exciting yeah yeah

Are there Lines Moving down from Canada into the New England or Northern New York areas they they could there are a bunch of different places where they could move from uh from neighboring populations and up from Canada is an option from the the Black Hills is where some of those dispersing individuals

Have come from um anywhere along the that Eastern Front there are places where mountain lions could make their way uh back into the Midwest and East Coast now here’s the Devil’s Advocate question why do we need Panthers why why should uh we be concerned about Mountain line

Populations yeah and that’s a very fair question question there’s lots of different answers depending on on your sensibility so one is that animals have an intrinsic right to exist and um and and that in its own right should be enough also they play really important ecological role in regulating prey

Numbers and uh all the trickle down effects that happen from their interactions with other species so um if we want to get into the nitty-gritty of it when uh so Pumas can help regulate prey uh and we’ve seen what happens when you remove all of the Apex carnivores on

The East Coast right you see that deer populations go through the roof and we’re seeing a lot more automobile collisions with people so there’s a human safety issue there that mountain lions could help with there’s also disease issues that um because of the the different interactions between

Mountain lions and their prey and the species that they compete with so with coyotes and um and how those relationships play out where we’re seeing um higher incidents of things like Lyme disease that we can trace back to losing those Apex carnivores so there’s there’s some selfish reasons that we should want

Mountain lions on the landscape for our own personal safety as well as preserving uh important ecological relationships yeah is climate change in the the Southwest particularly um impacting the lines I’m just wondering with the the hotter temperatures um certainly the drought that the the Southwest has been in for the last 20

Years or so yeah mountain lions um are one of the most they are the most widely distributed mammal in the Western Hemisphere so they range historically they range all the way from about halfway through Canada all the way down to the southern tip of South America and they occupy most types of habitats

Within that huge range so um so Mountain lines don’t make a great poster child for climate for the impacts of climate change in general but at the extremes we we do expect that we would see uh some some negative impacts of climate change so desert environments are are certainly

One of those where mountain lions uh historically have existed in low population density but with with droughts we could expect that we might lose them from those areas where their prey are being affected and so they can’t they can’t survive um and you know like we were talking about earlier with

Megafires um that’s going to play a role they’re also limited by snow depth so as snow patterns change that could influence where mountain lions can live now that’s just looking at the biology but when you layer in and you factor in climate change with human Wildlife conflict that’s where we could see real

Issues with mountain lions being able to persist because um climate change is going to influence their habitat use on a local scale that could drive them into places where they have increased conflict with people and that can red that can really dramatically reduce their population sure sure I’m wondering if if warmer

Temperatures are impacting the cats I mean we’re talking about Mountain lines but also in the news recently there have been uh reports of jaguars coming up um from Mexico into um southern Texas I think in Arizona yeah um so warmer temperatures can have a lot of different influences

And depending on if you’re talking about like warmer temp temperatures causing droughts like in the southwest that can certainly play a role uh warmer temperatures can also expand the range of mountainline competitors so uh if Jaguars expand their range into places where uh Jaguars haven’t been before um

They could you could see competition between those two species that could change the population Dynamics definitely something to watch for it’ be interesting that’s Dr Veronica yovich from panthera a global Wildcat conservation organization talking uh about Mountain lines across the country Veronica it’s been great to have you today I really appreciate your

Insights and look forward to see how some of those uh um tools out in California um help Mountain line populations yeah thank you so much for having me that’s our show for this week we hope you found it interesting the next time you’re in a national park in the west or

South Florida or Texas keep your eyes peeled right around sunrise or Sundown to see if you might spot one of these big cats next week we’re discussing the ongoing recovery work with giant seoa forests in seoa and Kings Canyon National Parks with the executive director of The seoa Parks Conservancy

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Mountain lions are an incredibly charismatic animal on landscapes within, and adjacent to, the National Park System. But they’re seldom seen because of their nocturnal tendencies. There recently was a new report that focused on a comprehensive estimate of mountain lions in California, and the number is much smaller than many had thought it was. To discuss California’s mountain lion population, and efforts to protect that population, our guest today is Dr. Veronica Yovovich, conservation scientist at Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization.