He brought the lions back

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, natural science, cougars, mountain lions, memoirs

It takes a real optimist to wait fifty years to write a memoir. The kind of optimism that motivates a young naturalist to stake the success of his PhD research on his determination to work in the tough Idaho wilderness surrounding the River of No Return, to track, capture, and study the most elusive apex predator that North America has to offer: the cougar. Furthermore, when he began the study he had a family. That's exactly what Maurice Hornocker did, and thus his recently-released memoir relates events that occurred in the period 1964 to 1973. He was 91 when he began to write…

Cougars on the Cliff: One Man's Pioneering Quest to Understand the Mythical Mountain Lion—a Memoir kept me up late several nights. It is the kind of page-turning book one would not expect from a scientist. Dr. Hornocker has a co-author, "roving reporter" David Johnson, who must have had something to do with the compelling prose. But artful prose needs something to work with, and boy, was there a lot to work with!

Possibly more dangerous than the big cats were the hunters, the ranchers, and others with a vested interest in destroying as many cougars as possible, and in keeping them classified as "vermin", so that there would be no "hunting season" or other restrictions on the slaughter. In the face of disparagement and occasional threats, and even attempted sabotage of the research project, Maurice (not Dr. Hornocker yet), with immense help from Wilber Wiles, caught the cats he needed to catch, re-caught them repeatedly, tracked them through several winter seasons (there was no radiotelemetry before the 1970's, so tracking in snow was a must), and gathered priceless data on their habits. Slowly, the data itself, and his passionate advocacy, made itself felt. At first, a temporary moratorium on hunting the cats (after a few collared cats were killed) was put in place, allowing the study to be completed, and eventually, a new law was passed giving the Idaho Fish and Game Commission the power to declare the Cougar a game animal, and thus to regulate it, including barring hunting the cats in specific areas. Eventually the largest contiguous wilderness area was created in central Idaho, where no persisting human presence is allowed: visit but leave only footprints, and gather only photos.

Cougars manage their territories well, and they practice "mutual avoidance", a term Maurice stressed and possibly coined. They manage their own reproduction. Rather than being rapacious monsters that kill for the fun of it, cougars kill to live, and their natural tendency to take down the weak and the old, primarily elk and mule deer, actually manages the prey herd to encourage strength and to ensure a thriving population. The "demon cats" of superstitious lore would soon wipe out the entire herd, and descend into starvation. Big cats can do cost/benefit analyses. Once this was understood, the wind went out of the sails of the "cougars as vermin" viewpoint.

How would one describe a typical day during the winter cougar-study season? It seems impossible, mainly because what Maurice and Wilber did are impossible to most of us. They began by preparing (sometimes building) and stocking ten camps throughout the study area. In each season, they both, and the 3-4 dogs they had with them, traveled on foot more than 1,000 miles. Not flat miles, but up hill and down dale, often in knee-deep or hip-deep snow. The average mileage required to track, tree, tranquilize and tag & measure one cat was about 100. In the initial three (exhausting!) seasons, somewhat more than 30 cougars were tagged, and multiple observations of previously-caught cats, plus re-catches to replace missing tags or collars: all added up to a ton of data about them. In addition, the men took samples from prey animals, to assess age and condition, so as to compile a picture of the ecology of cougar country.

The picture above shows a lioness with two half-grown "kittens". The book doesn't use the word "cubs". An interesting fact learned from the population studies, and from the author's family raising two orphaned kittens that weighed ten pounds at the start, is that the ears stay about the same distance from the chin as a lion's head grows, so that the mother cat, on the left, had her ears set lower compared to her young. Females have smaller heads than males, so mature males have ears set even lower. Once this relationship was understood, it was possible to determine the sex of a cat from a distance, and also estimate its age during its first few years. The heaviest females seldom exceeded 100 pounds, but most grown males were heavier; the heaviest was 182 pounds, though the average was more in the 120-140 pound range.

I worked at DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware for many years. For a few of those years a cougar resided in northern Delaware and southeastern Pennsylvania. One snowy day, a laboratory building at a DuPont facility was ringed with cougar tracks. The animal could smell the lab rats inside the building, and circled it a few times trying to find a way in. Later it bedded down at an outdoor YMCA facility a few miles away. For about a week, the Y Camp was its home base. Then it seemed to vanish, until reports in Maryland indicated it had moved on. Many white-tail deer live in this area, and it probably reduced the herd to the point that leaving was necessary. By the deer being "reduced" I mean partly eaten, and partly scared into moving on themselves. The big cat followed its food supply. Curiously, I don't know a single person who every actually saw the cat as more than the end of a tail as it vanished into the woods. They are secretive and very hard to spot!

When I say in my title above that Dr. Hornocker "brought the lions back", I refer to bringing back the concept of the cougar as an integral and necessary part of the natural world, throughout North America. Before his work, they'd become almost extinct outside a few wilderness areas such as the Bitterroot Mts of Idaho, because of their "vermin" image. That has changed. A change for the better. Just as the local family of foxes keeps the squirrels in our neighborhood on the alert, and limits the population of mice and voles, so a resident cougar or two keeps the deer from becoming vermin themselves. P.S. This juvenile fox had just awakened from a nap in our back yard. I took the picture from the family room window.

I don't mind that this memoir looks back half a century. The adventures are as fresh as yesterday's snowfall. Dr. Hornocker is one of the great benefactors of wide-scale ecology studies.