Trapping Lions Part 4: P2 Revisited

If you haven't seen Part 3, find out what you missed here.

P2 was a young male around 2 years old the first time we caught him. He stepped into a foot-hold snare that was placed along a major game trail and anchored to a tree stump no more than 4 feet high. The trail led to an artificial watering hole we called "the puddle" that countless elk had been frequenting. The water didn't go much higher than the elks' ankles, but it was water nonetheless.

Watering holes in the arid southwest can provide us with a wealth of information about wildlife, including whether or not a lion is in the area. As is the entire east side of the South Rim, the shallow pool was situated between the main road, Highway 64, and the boundary between the National Park and the National Forest. This proximity to the road made it easy for me to stop by fairly regularly to survey the banks and nearby trails for tracks. One day when I was on my way back from picking up remote cameras at another site, I pulled the car to a stop along the highway and hiked out to the puddle. Much to my surprise, there was a big, dead elk lying right in the pool, his formidable rack reaching for the sky.

It wasn't immediately clear to me how he died. I'd seen elk that were killed by lions, and none of the signs were there. I'd seen elk that were hit by cars, some with internal injuries that it made it hard to determine what happened, but close enough to the highway to make an educated guess. This was fairly near the highway, but that wasn't it. Near the top of his ribcage, the elk had a hole in his side the circumference of a golf ball. I hadn't seen a wound like that before. I took some pictures and thought I would run them by someone smarter than me later. I guessed that he hadn't been there very long, perhaps not even overnight, given that the scavengers hadn't found him. Usually the coyotes would be all over a nice meal like that on night one.

After poking around a bit, I hiked back to the car to get a remote camera unit. The carcass was likely to attract the attention of scavengers and carnivores, and I'd like to see if I could snag any interesting photos. Coyotes were often the stars of the show, but occasionally bobcats, condors, eagles, mountain lions and very rarely black bears would join the fun. I was eager to see if we could get any information about mountain lions in the area. The camera was an oldschool clunky piece of machinery that required 4 C Cell batteries and was housed in a practically bomb-proof metal box that I would have to wire to a tree at just the right height and angle so that critters would trigger the sensor.

I put the equipment in my backpack and hiked back to the puddle. My turnaround time was around an hour. Upon my return, I stopped dead in my tracks. The elk was still there, but not the whole thing. His magnificent rack was gone. That's when it dawned on me. I wasn't familiar with the wound because it was man made. It was possible that the chase began on the Forest Service side of the fence, where it was archery season, and the hunters had tracked him into the Park to claim their reward. Had they seen me? Were they there when I found the carcass? Or had I just scared them off? Were they aware that what they were doing was highly illegal? And how armed were they? Hunting legally on National Forest land is one thing, but when the animal crosses that arbitrary (well, as far as nature is concerned) boundary between National Forest land and National Park land, it's no longer legal to hunt it. But I was hardly in a position to get in argument over it, all alone in the woods with well-armed people feeling entitled to their prize.

Guns are (were?) illegal in Parks. Even taking trinkets, or in this case, trophies like massive antlers, is prohibited in Parks. So it taking archeological or even historical artifacts, like rusty old cans. Those rusty cans could tell the story of who was there, where they came from, and where they went in the great settling of the west. Rusty old cans of beans is all we have left in the trail of the mysterious and long lost Grand Canyon adventurers, Glen and Bessie Hyde. That could have been the last can of beans they shared before she lost her chance to earn the title of the first woman to -successfully- ride the rapids through the Grand Canyon.

Some people are wary of collecting archeological artifacts like potsherds and arrowheads at the Grand Canyon not out of respect for their place in our past, but because of their effect on the present. There are countless stories of people taking pieces home with them and mailing them back to try to dispel the bad juju that befell them after looting the pieces. For the archeologists, this is frustrating because without knowing the exact location of the piece, they can't put it back. Not only do they lose its locational context and with it valuable information, they have stores of these cursed pieces locked away in an undoubtedly haunted room. Or so I hear.

One fine day early in May 2004 we set a trap at the puddle. Not too long after that, we caught P2 there. It was our second lion capture at the Park. We collared P2, gave him the anecdote, and as soon as he booked off into the distance, some coyotes denning nearby gave chase. Eric followed with the video camera. The resulting video is very bigfootesque. He claims the lion is in the shot, but all that's visible is a series of blurs as the camera shakes and dips and Eric does some serious heavy breathing into the mic.

In the end, the good news was that the lion ran off wearing a shiny green collar without any further ado. The bad news is that the collar didn't work. The VHF radio signal wasn't beeping. I drove, hiked, and flew all over northern Arizona listening to static for months and never picked up a signal. I was sooooo bummed.

But that was ancient history. Now here we were on a snowy day in March, almost a year later. Eric and I had just left the newly collared P4, and hiked toward Bob Cave to investigate the second pair of tracks that we'd found at P4's capture site. You can imagine my surprise when I saw a big, massive, wet ball of P2 fur sporting that green collar in front of the entrance to Bob Cave.
So I did hear mountain lions screaming at eachother when I approached Rock Cave earlier that morning. P2 must have made a social call to P4 and bolted when he heard me coming, then stumbled into our trap while he was marking his territory down canyon.

P2 was big. He was so big that I had to stop referring to P4 as "P-Daddy." And he was cold and wet. The snare was anchored inside the "cave", a rock outcropping that formed a ledge where he would have been fairly dry if he had stayed in there. But he was standing out in the open on the slope in front of the outcrop when we approached. He grumbled, growled, spat, and generally let us know that he didn't want us coming near him. Wild cats tend to like their space. He laid his ears back (lion speak for back off), squatted back on his hind legs and lunged toward us. Another warning. But we kept approaching. We had to poke through some small pines and oaks to get a clean shot with the blowdart. We got him in the right front shoulder, just below the malfunctioning battery on the GPS collar.

As soon as he went limp, we released the cable from around P2's front paw and carried him into the shelter of the cave to warm him up. P2 had a long and fairly wide scrape running up the side of his left hip. It wasn't too deep, but it had scraped the hair clean off. It looked to us like it wasn't fresh, maybe a few days old. I don't know what caused it, it was reminiscent of road rash. Could he have scraped up against something while trying to take down an elk? We applied some anti-biotic ointment and wrapped him up in blankets to get him dry and keep his temperature up. We switched out his old collar for a new and improved one, took some blood samples, and frequently checked his vitals to make sure he was stable. Preventing hypothermia was our goal at that point.

We kept P2 warm and dry and let him sleep off the drugs while we pondered the relationship between these 2 big, supposedly territorial, adult males in such close proximity to one another. Were they related? Was one of them the father of the 3 cubs we caught on film in Pine Cave? How much did their home ranges overlap? Had they crossed paths before, and would they again? Were they competing for the same resources, like females, prey, and access to the best hunting areas and watering holes? If so, how would their duel over territory play out? What other kinds of threats would they face in their lives?


Only time would tell...................

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Photo captions: 1) P2 darted in front of Bob Cave, 2) P2 and I keeping out of the snow

What's wrong with the Jaguar Recovery Plan?

Que interesante- If you haven't seen the article Jaguars Don't Live Here Anymore, it's well worth a read. In it, Dr. Alan Rabinowitz lays out the definitive critique of current jaguar politics in the U.S.

When I recently blogged about jaguar recovery, I lamented the dearth of information about jaguar habitat requirements in the southwest. But I still thought that the recovery plan would be considered a conservation victory. Rabinowitz, who has studied jaguars and several other species of large cats for nearly 30 years, presents a different take. He argues that the southwestern U.S. is marginal jaguar habitat, and as such, is not capable of supporting a viable population.

This is an important point in light of the much-anticipated, and much-litigated, development of a jaguar recovery plan- announced earlier this month by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Full on recovery of the species could involve long, drawn-out, expensive efforts like re-introducing the cats to places where it would be hard, if not impossible, for them to thrive.

If it's not feasible to establish jaguar populations in this country, this use of funds, resources, personnel, and jaguars could be misdirected. Dr. Rabinowtz suggests that our energies could be better spent conserving jaguar habitat in areas where the animals do live- south of our border. Viable jaguar populations span from Mexico to Argentina, and the cats face a myriad of threats along the way; habitat fragmentation, persecution by humans, deforestation, political borders.....

If the creation of a federal recovery plan encourages friends of the jaguar in the U.S. to focus on an unrealistic goal instead of helping conserve what is left of jaguar habitat, maybe it isn't such a good thing... I stand corrected.

Photo Caption: Macho B, February 2008

Leading by Example- Green Solar Development in California

If you've been following the debates over development of renewable energy in southern California, you've heard it all; NIMBY, PIMBY, Feinstein this, monument that. You've read all about "green" energy development and conservationists pitted against one another in the expansive, sunny arena known as the Mojave Desert.

But have you heard about eSolar? They're taking the lead in developing solar in environmentally conscientious ways. They built a "concentrated" solar thermal power plant using advanced technology and smart planning to leave a smaller footprint than anyone else in the biz. And they developed the plant on previously disturbed private lands rather than destroying pristine desert habitat. Develop solar and preserve natural landscapes? Yes, it can be done. May the other developers follow in their (small) footprints.

Keeping Elk off the Road- Wildlife Crossings Coming to I-40 Soon

In Arizona, hundreds of elk are hit by cars every year. Locals are well aware of the situation--they see the carnage on the sides of the roads every day. Now a stretch of I-40 near Flagstaff is about to get safer. AGFD has joined forces with the ADOT, FHWA, US Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and the Arizona Elk Society to build wildlife crossings along the road, allowing elk to safely pass underneath. The crossings will reduce collisions between elk and vehicles and provide connectivity for elk, along with other wildlife, between wildlands on either side of the interstate.

According to research by USGS biologists, I-40 serves as a barrier more formidable than the Grand Canyon to certain wildlife species, including mountain lions.

Even if you're not concerned about things like habitat connectivity, you should be concerned about wildlife-vehicle collisions. The resulting accidents are not only deadly to animals, but costly for drivers and tax payers alike. The Federal Highway Administration estimates that the average cost of an individual elk-vehicle accident to society is $18,561 --the number includes a monetary value estimate of $3,000 per elk. I have no idea how they came up with that, but even if you don't buy it, the remaining 15K per accident adds up.

Arizona Game and Fish biologists are getting high tech, just as they have for similar projects on I-17 and SR 260. They're capturing and fitting elk with GPS collars to determine exactly where crossings are needed the most. Then ADOT will incorporate the crossings into plans for improvements to the interstate. This a great combination of technology and biology that will benefit elk, people, and other wildlife that will use the crossings.

Can Jaguar Populations Recover in the US?

Everyone loves jaguars. Except perhaps central american pig farmers, and early American settlers. The settlers' campaigns to eradicate these big cats were so effective that its not surprising many modern Americans don't even know that the jaguar used to roam these hills.

In pre-Columbian America, Jaguars spanned across the southwest from Texas to California. Its hard to say what the northernmost reach of their range was, but in northern Arizona they were found as far north as the Grand Canyon, where records indicate a female and 2 cubs were killed in 1943. Aside from occasional records documenting their deaths, there's very little historical information about the jaguars of the US. How large were their individual territories? What was their main source of prey? Did they need to live near water? Did they migrate seasonally? How many were there? The questions remain unanswered to this day.

While I was researching mountain lion ecology at the Grand Canyon, by far the most common question that people asked me was, "How many mountain lions are there?"....How many are there in the canyon at this moment, or how many generally or historically reside inside the National Park, or are how many use the Park as part of their territory at least some of the time? No matter how you clarify the question, I couldn't whittle the answer down to a number. People ask this question with the inherent assumptions that A) there must be a proven, reliable way to get this information, B) that someone must have done it, and C) they must still be doing it so that we have a current count.

Censusing wild animals is not a straightforward task, unless the population is so critically endangered that the last remaining individuals are known, named, tracked, and under constant vigilance. When biologists gather information about the habitat requirements of a species (what kind of vegetation or land cover do they prefer, are they constrained to certain elevations, terrain or slope, proximity to water, distance from roads, abundance of prey....on and on), they can use that information to determine how much land meets those criteria. Coupled with statistics about how much land is needed to support an individual or a population, they can do some math to determine how many individuals a given tract of land could support. Theoretically.

For example, if we knew what constituted "good" black bear habitat in Northern Arizona, and the approximate home range requirements for bears in this area, we could use maps and data to determine how much black bear habitat exists within say, Grand Canyon National Park. Then we could walk around making pompous statements like "Given current conditions, Grand Canyon National Park could support as many as X bears." But even that would be a long shot.

Not only are we lacking the data needed to make those kinds of inferences, but those algorithms don't take into account population dynamics, current threats, mortality and natality rates, fragmentation, isolation, or even history. Given that grizzly bears were decimated here, and black bears nearly so, we don't even know if the population has recovered enough to have reached any kind of equilibrium. In short, we don't know how many bears are in Grand Canyon National Park, or northern Arizona for that matter. Yet agencies responsible for their management have been known to toss out numbers like so much confetti at a wedding. Generally its a good bet that anyone who has concrete numbers rolling off their tongue pulled those numbers straight out of their arse.

The state of information about jaguars in the U.S. is in even worse shape. Things were looking up early in the century when remote cameras snapped photos of jaguars in southern Arizona. People got excited. The cats were here. Then people got excited again in February 2009, when biologists fitted a jaguar with a satellite collar promising a multitude of fine-scale data about habitat use. This was the virtual jackpot. But days later the situation was even more grim than before. Macho B was dead.

The agencies followed up Macho B's death with a press conference, a witchhunt, and a memorial. The ceremony in Tucson morphed into a bit of a protest, with advocates publicly demanding the creation of a federal recovery plan for jaguars. The plight of Macho B has generated a lot of attention, and rightly so. He was the last known wild jaguar in the United States. Upon his death, the southwest suffered a major loss. People love jaguars.

The public outcry, backed by threats, lawsuits, and demands for retribution- lit a fire under US Fish and Wildlife Service officials who recently announced that they're going to develop a recovery plan for the jaguar. This is big news. This should be a victory for the species whose needs, and mere existence in the US, have long gone ignored. But its only a first step.

According to Wikipedia, for any permanent population to thrive, protection from killing, an adequate prey base, and connectivity with Mexican populations are essential. That means work for government officials, conservationists, and biologists alike. Agencies need to draft regulations for protecting jaguars, biologists need to learn more about their habitat and prey requirements, and somebody needs to figure out how to make the border permeable for wildlife and connected ecosystems in the face of the Great Wall of Mexico.

We would also need to educate people about living with jaguars before they get here. Just look at the way we kill every mountain lion that wanders within half a mile of a house, city, horse, or dares to show its hide somewhere its not expected. Now imagine that was an even bigger cat, about whom we know even less, and you can see that the threat posed by freaked-out citizens would be pretty great.

An integral part of any recovery plan is designating critical habitat for the species. That could be hard to do given the above mentioned dearth of information about jaguar habitat requirements in the US, which means more research is needed about whether the southwest is good jaguar habitat at all.

The Arizona Game and Fish department is currently soliciting input for the revision of the state wildlife action plan. This could be an opportunity for the public to ask the state to take a proactive stance and develop a solid jaguar management plan that dictates the need for further research; collaboration with other states, countries, and jaguar experts; and a plan for addressing conflicts and mitigating threats to the species.

While Macho B's death was a major blow to Arizona's jaguar population, a federal recovery plan could be a major boon toward better management of the species in the US. But the recovery plan alone won't "pave the way" for jaguars. We've got lots more to do; legislate, research, educate, collaborate, and more. This is our opportunity to start planning for coexisting with jaguars. Its time we stop pointing fingers and start laying the groundwork for the future. Afterall, people love jaguars.