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Counting cougs
by Cherie Winner | © Washington State University
"And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion." —D.H. Lawrence
There are cougars in Washington-seemingly, more than ever before. In 1995, the year before a statewide ballot initiative banned the hunting of cougars with hounds, there were 255 verified human-cougar encounters in the state. By 2000 the number had nearly quadrupled. It has since returned to pre-ban levels in some areas, but the public perception is that cougars, after their near-extermination in the 20th century, are making a comeback-and must be stopped.
Rob Wielgus, director of the Large Carnivore Conservation Lab at WSU and Cooley's advisor, disagrees. His research team has found that in parts of the state where the number of complaints has been highest, cougar populations are either holding steady or declining. That the big cats are becoming more visible, but not more numerous, is just one of the paradoxes stemming from the same source: much of what we thought we knew about cougars is wrong.
The main problem has been the lack of detailed information about cougars in their natural habitat. In the past, researchers might put a radio collar on just one or a few cats in an area. They had no way to draw accurate conclusions about how cougars of different sexes and ages divvy up the habitat, where and what they hunt, and how they interact with each other and with humans.
Over the past several years, Wielgus and his students have begun to fill that gap by doing intensive studies of cougars in three areas of Washington. The Selkirk Mountains, in the far northeast near Metaline Falls, is home to a population that ranges into northern Idaho and neighboring British Columbia. The Wedge, in the northeastern part of the sate, is a rough triangle outlined by the Kettle and Columbia Rivers and the Canadian border. The other area is near Cle Elum and Roslyn, just west of Ellensburg. The researchers use hounds to tree the cats, which are then tranquilized and fitted with transmitter collars. At the start of the study the collars only sent a VHF radio signal; now they carry both a radio and a GPS (Global Positioning System) transmitter. By collaring and following several dozen cougars, Cooley and fellow students Ben Maletzke and Hugh Robinson, and Donald Katnik ('02 Ph.D. Natural Resource Sciences) and Catherine Lambert ('03 M.S. Natural Resource Sciences) have provided a detailed look at cougar behavior-and some big surprises.
Wielgus says one clear finding from their work is that wildlife managers should not assume that an increase in complaints about cougars means there are more cougars around. In many cases, just the opposite is true: even a declining population can lead to more sightings and more complaints, if the remaining cougars are adolescents who don't know any better than to stay away from humans.
Based on his work over the last decade, Wielgus says that with solitary predators such as cougars, age matters. One of the biggest influences on how the animals behave around humans is the age structure of their population, especially how many young males there are. And that, in turn, depends largely on how heavily they are hunted and how many big males are taken out of the population.
He explains that although cougars don't live in packs, they do have contact with others of their kind. The interactions between adolescents and adult males help teach the youngsters what is and isn't appropriate prey, and what is and isn't acceptable behavior.
Young male cougars make trouble, he says, "because they don't know what they're doing. When you have no old guys left, then no one controls the troublemakers." He says a juvenile cougar is like an 18-year-old human. Take out the dominant males who keep them in line, and "that's all you've got, is 18-year-old males running the show. Just try to imagine what the world would be like."
Wielgus and his team found that in the Selkirk Mountains and the Wedge, where hunting pressure is high, kitten survival is low and adults only average between three and four years old. In the Cle Elum area, with far fewer cougars killed by hunters, the average age is double that, and kitten survival is much higher.
In all three places-and despite the difference in hunting pressure-cougar numbers are mostly staying about the same. The Cle Elum population has a healthy number of adult males, and encounters with humans are rare. The Selkirk and Wedge populations have a lot of young males, who migrated in from nearby regions after older males were shot. Sightings and encounters are much more frequent than at Cle Elum.
"Everyone thinks the population's exploding [in the Selkirks and the Wedge], but they're not exploding at all," says Wielgus. "It's just that you've got more of these young, visible, problematic teenagers."
Despite his group's painstaking work and solid findings, some politicians and cougar opponents continue to cite increased encounters as proof the cougar population is expanding. That frustrates Wielgus.
"The science is the science," he says. "People say, 'I know that there's more cougars than ever, because I just know.' What we're saying is, there aren't more now, you've just seen more, because you've killed all the big guys that kept out these young troublemakers.'
"Look, you have a belief. Fine. Test the belief. That's what we're doing now. We have study areas where they're heavily hunted, and we have areas where they're virtually not hunted at all. And the interesting thing is, the areas where we aren't hunting cougars heavily, it's virtually zero in human complaints."
He understands the concern over encounters with cougars, but says we need to find a different response than killing more of the big cats.
"Our management actions are achieving the exact reverse of what is desired," he says. "It's the shift in the age structure that results in the increased complaints. It's just disastrous. The heavy hunting that we're doing in Washington State is causingincreased human-cougar conflicts. The putative solution is causing the problem."
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