You probably should've died," the husky, walrus-mustached U.S. Forest Service worker told me that balmy July evening.
It was 2015, the height of the last so-called drought that never really ended on California's Central Coast. And the animals, myself included, were restless. One long summer after another, interrupted by brief winters that brought only sputters of rain and drizzle for the state's mountains, valleys, rivers, and reservoirs, had cooked us in that kiln known as the Central Valley.
It was hot, dry, and everyone from the highest levels of society down to the lowliest ant were sick of it. Which is why that day I'd cut out of the office early and sped past my house with its broken swamp cooler and halls filled with cats and stale air and made a beeline for the mountains on the North Fork of the Tule River in the Sequoia National Forest. I drove like a madman on winding roads for about 40 minutes and then hit a trail along a canyon I'd hiked more times than I could count.
The plan was to break camp at about 7,000 feet, where the thin mountain air would drop to as low as 48 degrees that night, an almost alien-like difference to the 112-degree oven down in the valley below.
When I saw her, I thought I'd stepped into a dream.
A mountain lion, a mature female, was staring right at me, no more than 50 feet away. We were separated merely by a trail and few large spruce trees.
It didn't take her long to size all 5-feet-10 of me up before she quickly dissolved into the brush.
Now, I may be stupid enough to hike by myself at dusk, but I wasn't about to stay in the woods all night after seeing a cat that big, that close.
I turned back.
The lion slipped from my mind. I stopped to take a few photos and readjust my pack.
Then I saw her again.
This time she was on the trail, farther away, but staring right at me. Blocking my exit. For some reason, I screamed. Not because you are supposed to make noise when you see a cougar, either. No, this was a "holy shit, I think I'm about to die," holler.
I guess she got the point. In an instant, she vanished again.
The rest of the hike went without incident. Then I ran into my forester friend, who called me an idiot, patted me on the back, and handed me a beer.
"The only cougars you should be worrying about at your age are at the country club," he said, his pot belly jiggling as he laughed. "That's why you don't hike when it's dark, Cole."
I remember asking him how many were up there.
His answer, even to this day, still rings in my mind, "Aw, hell, I don't know. No one does."
What he said that night was true, and to this day the state's exact mountain lion population remains a mystery. But methods are improving, and becoming more refined, such as a new project by California's Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) that aims to map the state's mountain lion populations by regions.
It is both an endeavor to accurately account for how many of the creatures still roam California while determining the health of their gene pool. The effort is also an avid attempt by state scientists to learn as much as possible about one of the continent's fiercest predators.
"Mountain lions are a signal animal for similar processes that are going on with other animals down the food chain," said Winston Vickers, a veterinarian with the Southern California Mountain Lion Project. "Their survival as a species is not threatened in California, in my own view, but local populations are under threat and that threat is probably increasing.
"You can change whole wildlife communities when you remove a top regulator of an ecosystem."
The hunter
"They can all be kind of unique and hairy I guess, there's not really a rule book," Justin Dellinger, a mountain lion and wolf researcher for CDFW, told me casually as he explained how he hunted mountain lions with a CO2-powered tranquilizer rifle.
I heard about Dellinger through another news publication. I remember the story came out right after a hiker stumbled upon a dead deer carcass a lion had cached for the winter in the Irish Hills to the west of San Luis Obispo.
Like most mountain lion sightings, the incident was widely reported by local outlets and speculated on wildly by the public. But aside from closing a few trails, no one paid much attention to the cats found to be living in that small chunck of coastal mountain land.
That is, except for Dellinger, who went up into the hills with a team of hounds and found one of the animals, eventually tranquilizing the lion and fitting it with a tracking collar.
"Basically any fresh lion sign is what we're looking for," he explained, "it's gotta be fresh or else the dogs can't do much with it."
It's hard work. The team of two men (Dellinger and his houndsman) wake up well before sunrise, as early as 2 a.m., and head out into rough country for most of the day.
"If we don't catch anything, we are usually back by around 2 [p.m.] or 3 p.m.," he said. "If we find one, well, that is just kind of dependent on the situation."
Once Dellinger and his team of hounds are on the trail of a lion, they can typically lead it to an area where it's either backed against a cliff or forced up a tree. Then the cats are tranquilized with a dart from a CO2 rifle before Dellinger climbs up the tree and lowers the animal down with a belay and pulley system.
After the cat is sedated, Dellinger and his houndsman take a variety of swabs with Q-Tips– ranging from blood, to saliva, to fecal matter. The samples help scientists figure out an animal's diet and trace its genetic history.
The latter is particularly important when it comes to figuring out how isolated a mountain lion population is. Since the new project began, CDFW has identified 10 groups of wild cougars statewide with slightly different genetic variations or varieties.
The predators are largely divided by human-erected barriers, such as highways, rail lines, and urban and agricultural development. It is those "walls" that scientists worry are boxing in the lions, forcing them to mate with relatives, weakening the gene pool, and increasing risk for genetic mutation and stagnation.
For example, one male mountain lion found in the wildlands north of LA was cornered by highways and development, so he carved out a small territory near where he had already mated. The result was the lion ended up procreating with his daughter multiple times and on one occasion his granddaughter.
"That's exactly what we are seeing, and naturally most people would think right off the bat, 'Well, that's probably not good,'" Vickers, with the state lion project, said.
In other words, the lions are cut off in some areas from populations that in the past were within reach. And the isolation could spell doom for certain groups, such as the ones dotting Southern California and parts of the Los Padres National Forest.
"In terms of California, I can imagine in long time frames worst-case scenarios of just a disappearance of mountain lions in the coastal mountains," Vickers said.
Scientific census
Measuring wildlife populations has never been an exact science. Most biologists in the field will tell you that state and federal governments do a variety of head counts when it comes to animals, including large mammals like mountain lions and their primary prey, deer.
This process, in most cases, involves agents sent out into the field and literally counting the fauna they see. They then create population estimates based on those tallies along with supplemental data such as harvest numbers and meat locker records.
Essentially, they count the bodies, how many of the animals were killed in a particular hunting zone, and when. It can tell a scientist a lot about the population, especially when they can examine its DNA and look for signs of inbreeding that, if left unchecked, weakens the gene pool.
California's Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW) currently employs these practices to monitor its deer population. And, by all accounts, it works pretty well, although department employees will tell you it could be far more precise with better funding.
But those methods can't really be applied to mountain lions, an elusive predator that is illegal to hunt since the state passed a moratorium in the early '90s. For years, DFW has just told the public the lion population in California was somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000.
At best, scientists say, the current method is problematic when it comes to measuring populations and ascertaining their overall health. One of the main reasons is that the estimation number given to the public is solely based off potential habitat for lions and then extrapolated based on the available land.
"The state is so big that a statewide estimate doesn't have as much use as regional estimates that make up the statewide numbers," Dellinger said. "You could give an estimate of say 3,000 animals statewide, but that's going to mean different things to someone in Modoc County versus the southern, more urban part, like Santa Barbara."
The broad generalization also does very little for providing the proverbial "snapshot in time" that outdoor enthusiasts are looking for when they go to the state for information on mountain lions.
"Probably the most common question DFW gets, and we get, is, 'How many are there?' It's something the general public is interested in–having at least a framework to put mountain lions into and a sense of how common they are in the landscape," Vickers said.
Kevin Cooper, a biologist with the Los Padres National Forest told the Sun in October 2017 the mountain lion populations were "really difficult to get a handle on. I mean, they are right here under our noses all the time and almost no one ever sees them."
"If we are trying to manage them, that's a problem."
Limitations of sightings
Cooper was talking about verified sightings, not just reports from the public that they've seen a mountain lion. It seemed like a very arbitrary way of adding up encounters with the predator when I first had the process described to me. But it's an important distinction for scientists like Cooper and Dellinger, who argue that the public doesn't always know what to look for or what they are seeing.
"I find all the time when I get emails from the public, emailing me pictures of things, tracks and things like that, it's very rare that it is a lion they've encountered," Dellinger said. "Unless the sightings are verified by game cameras or security cameras, it's hard to really quantify whether there's been an actual increase in people seeing them."
That's why the state and most wildlife organizations tend not to map mountain lion sightings due to the potential unreliability of the reporter and what Dellinger calls "the story sharing phenomenon" practiced by the public, hunters, and exacerbated by social media.
"If I see a lion and I encounter a lion, I tell you, then you adopt that story as your own or whatever, and then it grows from there," he explained.
In reality, people more often than not misidentify the animal. One California-backed study in the late '90s suggested that as many as 95 percent of public mountain lion sightings were inaccurate, according to Dellinger.
However, that's not to say all reports from locals, hikers, and hunters are inaccurate. "When you do have game or security cameras outside of homes, that's obviously easily verified," Dellinger said.
Jeff Landers, vice president of the Santa Maria Valley Sportsmen's Association and a board member on Santa Barbara County's Fish and Game Commission, said the signs of large mountain lion populations on the Central Coast, and the state in general, were hard to ignore.
"Years ago, lions were very elusive, but now they're being seen more and more and more," he added, before explaining that almost every monthly Sportsmen's meeting had at least one comment from a hunter remarking on sighting a lion, its tracks, or a nearby deer kill. "It's noticeable for somebody that goes out and actually hunts and tracks game. There's just way too many of 'em."
Hunters like Landers believe the reason mountain lions are exploding in certain areas of the state is due to the moratorium on hunting them, a law sportsmen have opposed since it was implemented. In 1990, Californians passed Proposition 117, designating lions as a "specially protected species" and illegal to hunt.
But despite the law, lions are still hunted and killed statewide (a little more than 100 each year on average) but can only be done so if a depredation permit is issued to kill a "specific lion killing livestock or pets; to preserve public safety; or to protect listed bighorn sheep."
While the latter is not an issue for the Central Coast, San Luis Obispo sits near the top of all counties in terms of issued permits and "takes," or when a lion is killed.
In 2015, 24 permits were issued within the county, with 11 mountain lions taken. The next two years, the numbers dropped significantly, with just six permits issued and three cats killed in 2016, and only seven issued in 2017, which resulted in five dead cougars.
According to wildlife experts, 2015 is a particularly interesting year, considering the number of cats "taken" in SLO County accounted for roughly 10 percent of all killed statewide under depredation permits.
However, it's hard to infer much about the mountain lions' regional population when looking at granted depredation permits because the state has to give them to landowners if livestock have been slain. And those landowners aren't always equipped to track, let alone "take," a mountain lion. It's also hard to judge how cats killed with authorization affect the overall population when scientists can't say what the numbers are.
It's a situation that has hunters, conservationists, and wildlife biologists stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to managing California's wildlife.
"We don't have good game management out here on the Central Coast," Landers said. "Nobody wants anything to be extinct–a perfect balance in nature is good–but I don't think we have that perfect balance."
Endgame
Driving back from Modoc County after a long day of hunting one afternoon, Dellinger told me over the phone that he hoped this newest DFW-led accounting effort would alleviate the public and hunters' concerns, while also helping scientists find ways to better study and manage mountain lions.
"It gives greater insight on how you go about looking at conflict between them, humans, and other animals," he said. "When you're getting depredation tags, you can more adequately understand what the removal of that animal is doing to a population and what it could mean for the area in general, given that lions do sort of sit on the top of the foodchain so to speak."
Dellinger noted that more than 90 percent of mountain lions taken in the state were due to livestock being killed. So maybe, he added, a lot of the run-ins with people and lions can be prevented. But that's a tall order for counties on the Central Coast, which have seen significant population growth during considerable climatic swings.
"San Luis Obispo is really unique between its development over the last decade and the drought," he added. "There's a lot of things that suggest there is potential for conflict and for lions and people to encounter each other more often or to be at odds with one another.
"I don't know exactly what the solution is, ... but there's not a silver bullet."
As the sun set that evening, I trudged up a short section of a trail by Johnson Ranch. At the top of the hill, I could see Highway 101, a snake of a landmark winding through the coastal mountains. From there, San Luis Obispo is visible, bleeding into the Edna Valley.
I wondered about when the last time a lion sat at this same spot. And if that male or female in search of a safe piece of land to breed and live had looked at the highway and balked as car after car carelessly sped by.
The corridor already claimed one male lion earlier this year. He had tried to cross just north of the Los Osos Valley Road exit before being hit by a car.
I turned and headed back down the hill.
There were no lions on the trail that day, at least any I could see, just like it is most days. But I couldn't help but wonder when the next one would be sighted and how the public would catch a glimpse.
Would it be some hunter spotting a track out in public lands? Or a local couple on their morning hike? Maybe one will pop up on a game camera. Or maybe we'll just see it like we do all too often, in a grainy cellphone photo or video from the side of the road, bruised and lifeless, along the border of civilization.
Contact Staff Writer Spencer Cole at [email protected].
