 |
The second day of our quest is just as gorgeous as the
first.
“It’s beautiful to look at, but for what we wanted to do today,
it’s not very good,” says MacArthur. The surface of the snow is
even harder than yesterday. The dogs will have a tough time staying
with the scent, but we’re going to let them try. We snowmobile an
hour in to a spot where he found cougar tracks the day before.
Hubner rides with Wilson, I ride with Cooley, and MacArthur pulls a
black plastic sled carrying Emma and his two hounds. Sooner’s a
black-and-tan, about 11 years old, and vocal. Newly’s an
eight-year-old tricolor whose previous owner used her to hunt
cougars.
“She’s a one-in-a-million dog,” says MacArthur. She’s a tireless
tracker but dangerously quiet, rarely sounding off until she’s on a
hot scent or right near a cat.
“I figure it’ll get her eaten some day,” he says. “She’ll be
quiet, and jump a cat in the rocks, and that’ll be it. I shouldn’t
think things like that. It worries me.”
When we reach the tracks, Emma starts baying immediately. Sooner
chimes in. MacArthur releases the dogs, who snuffle avidly around
the tracks and then dash away up a small drainage. Emma barks
often, Sooner occasionally, Newly not at all. Wilson says we can
get excited when we hear Newly bark. But she never does. Within a
few minutes, the dogs are back at the start zone. MacArthur urges
them onto the trail again, and again they head into the woods. He
follows them on foot. We sled out on a parallel track. We see the
dogs reach a bare patch, where they circle for a few minutes, then
tentatively move on up the drainage. Within 50 yards, they’ve lost
the trail.
Cooley appreciates the irony of using hounds to capture the cats
that can no longer be legally hunted with dogs. She’s a “dog
person” herself, she says, and the chance to work with Emma is one
of her favorite parts of the research. She disagrees with the
argument made by supporters of the ban that hunting cougars with
hounds is not humane. Hounds tree the cat they’re chasing, which
allows the hunter to get a good look at the cat before shooting it.
The alternative that’s been used since the ban went into effect is
to let people shoot on sight.
“They bundled it with a big-game package,” says Cooley. “If you
got a deer permit, for an extra five bucks they’d throw in a cougar
tag. So there’s tons of people out there trying to get a deer or an
elk, and a lot of them have cat tags. The number of cats taken went
way up. And the problem with that is, you can’t be selective about
it. You see a cat across a field and you shoot it, and you don’t
know if it’s an adult or if it’s a juvenile, if it’s a male or a
female.” The female harvest went way up, she says, resulting in the
death of existing kittens and a steep drop in the production of new
litters.
“When it’s in a tree, if you use a hound, you’re right there,
and if the hunter is experienced they can tell what sex it is and
decide not to take it. It’s more selective,” she says.
She, Wilson, and MacArthur confer and decide our last best
chance is to try to find Faith. MacArthur got some beeps from her
collar earlier in the day. We ride a couple more bumpy miles and
then hike to a hillside that gives the antennas access to a wide
span of territory. Beep, beep. Pause. Weaker beep. The cat is
moving. Cooley and MacArthur hike on a little further, down another
gully and up the next hill, but come back empty. We won’t see a
cougar this trip.
_____________________________________________________
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife advises
people who live near cougar habitat to keep pets and farm animals
in enclosed structures at night and to bring children indoors at
dusk. When hiking or camping, go with at least one other person,
keep children close to you, and make enough noise (normal
conversation is enough) that a nearby cougar would hear you coming
and have time to move away. If you do encounter a cougar in the
wild, don’t run. That would trigger the cougar’s instinct to chase.
Try to look bigger than you are, and don’t look away from the cat.
If the cougar appears to be aggressive, throw rocks at it, shout,
jump up and down—try to convince it you are more trouble than
you’re worth.
For some useful tips from the DFW, click here.
_____________________________________________________
“That’s what’s so exciting,” says Cooley, upbeat by nature.
“It’s still rare to see them.” The cats’ reputation for secrecy is
well deserved. Anyone who spends a lot of time in the wild has
probably passed close to a cougar more than once and not realized
it. Fortunately, Cooley and the rest of Wielgus’s team have had
enough successful days to collar more than 50 cougars of all ages
and gather nearly 50,000 GPS points from them.
They 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
causing increased human-cougar conflicts. The putative
solution is causing the problem.”
Page
1
2
3
Washington State Magazine Home
|
|
| |
.jpg)
