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Wildlife biologist Hilary Cooley sets a radio receiver to pick up signals from a collared cougar.

And I think in this empty world there was room for

me and a mountain lion.

^{—D.H. Lawrence}

Perched on a hillside a few miles from the Canadian border, raising an antenna into the air and listening for a beep from a radio-collared cougar, Hilary Cooley is doing what she dreamed of as a kid.

“I remember watching the Discovery Channel and seeing biologists on the slope with the antenna, tracking the wolves in Yellowstone just after the reintroduction, and I thought, ‘that would be so cool,’” she says.

Now in her final year as a doctoral student in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University, Cooley seems perfectly fitted, even fated, for the work she does. She’s strong enough to wrangle a snowmobile around fallen trees and hike uphill through deep snow carrying a 30-pound pack. And she’s not just a WSU Cougar; she got her undergrad degree at the University of Vermont, whose mascot is the catamount. Same creature, different name.

“Back there it didn’t mean anything, because there weren’t any cats around,” she says. “Here it’s different.”

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.”
 

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