Studying a phantom in the mountains

By SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE

Standing on the lip of a steep cliff on the Uncompahgre Plateau in western Colorado, Ken Logan rotates a telemetry antenna to pinpoint the radio signal of a female cougar designated F-7. Far below, aspens shimmer and ponderosa pines jut above the rest of the canopy.

Logan, tanned and fit at 50, wants to tag F-7's cubs, which she has stashed in a jumble of rocks on the mountainside below. But she won't leave them, and Logan is wary.

In 25 years of studying cougars, he and his team have had about 300 "encounters" and have been challenged six times.

"And five of the six times," he tells Smithsonian magazine, "it was a mother with cubs. So what we don't want today is mom there with her cubs behind her."

Logan, who works for the Colorado Division of Wildlife, is at the beginning of a 10-year, $2 million study of mountain lions on 800 square miles of the Uncompahgre in Colorado.

There's a lot at stake for cougars throughout the West, where beliefs about the cat are more often rooted in politics, emotion and guesswork than in hard facts. The animals are so elusive that no one knows for certain how many exist.

"We're studying a phantom in the mountains," says Logan. The current estimate for the West's lion population is 30,000. Some scientists, including Logan, think there are more now than 50 years ago. Cougars are drifting back into the Midwest after an absence of more than 100 years.

This speculative recovery delights some people and worries others. It has turned the cat into a symbol for competing interests. Are cougars destructive, overabundant predators that kill livestock and deer, or splendid, overhunted icons that deserve protection? And how dangerous are they to people?

Encounters have increased as more people spend leisure time in the cat's habitat, and as roads, houses and development claim more cougar country. Fatal attacks in the United States and Canada are rare -- 21 in the past 115 years -- but 11 have happened since 1990.

Where should we draw the line between protecting them and protecting us?

In 1990, Californians voted to outlaw hunting cougars entirely. But most Western wildlife agencies have gone in the other direction in the past few decades, increasing the number that could be killed annually.

In 1982, hunters in ten Western states killed 931 cougars, and by the early 2000s the number was topping 3,000. The number of hunting permits surged between the late 1990s and early 2000s after many states either expanded the season for lions, lowered the cost of licenses, raised bag limits -- or all three.

In Texas, Logan's home state, cougars -- even cubs -- can be killed year-round without limit.

Because it's so hard for wildlife agencies to get accurate counts of cougars, Logan and Linda Sweanor (Logan's spouse and fellow biologist) devised a conservative strategy for managing them by dividing a state into different zones: for sport hunting, for controlled killing in areas crowded with people or livestock, and for cougar refuges, which Logan calls "biological savings accounts."

Many of the country's cougar experts have recommended that wildlife agencies adopt such zone management, but that hasn't happened.

"Other political interests came to bear," Logan says dryly, referring mostly to ranchers and hunters. "At least the science is there now. I think policy-makers and managers will go back to it, because management based on politics is going to fail."