Deep freeze for young lions

"We've got a pile of dead cats"

By JIM MANN / Daily Inter Lake

The walk-in freezer at Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks headquarters in Kalispell contains irrefutable evidence of a troublesome trend: 15 frozen, hanging mountain lions, most of them getting there for management control reasons.

"We've got a pile of dead cats, without a doubt," said Eric Wenum, the state's regional wildlife conflict specialist. "This has been ongoing. It really started in mid-June. And it's been a steady trickle since."

The largest of the lions is a 145-pound male measuring about 8 feet long from nose to tail tip. Two of the lions hanging in the freezer were middle-aged and healthy until they got hit by cars. But the rest are smaller, inexperienced lions that had trouble making a living on deer.

The most recently dispatched lion's story is similar to the others.

About two weeks ago, Wenum got a report that a mountain lion had killed two small ponies in a corral just south of Glacier Park International Airport.

Wenum responded with some chase hounds that initially could not pick up a scent, but the pony carcasses were left out and the lion returned to its kill.

"It came back the next night and was dispatched in a pasture," Wenum said, noting that it was unusual for the lion to kill two animals.

"Lions don't sport kill," he said. "Being a mountain lion is dangerous business. It doesn't take much for them to suffer a debilitating injury."

Another incident involved a lion that killed a domestic goat in the Lakeside area. That lion returned to its kill and was caught in a leg snare.

It's rare to trap a lion, Wenum said, because a lion does not respond to bait.

"If they kill it, they are more than happy to come back and feed," he said. "Lions are not scavengers. They have to be dying on their feet to eat carrion."

The recent rash of problems mostly involves lions that are taking desperate actions to avoid starvation. The trend has roots going back to the severe winter of 1996-'97.

"Everybody who was here remembers that was a significant event," Wenum said. "We had a lot of deer on the landscape and we started to have winter mortality."

Deep snow and persistent low temperatures led to weakened deer that were highly vulnerable to predators. The following spring, the lion population was healthy and robust, leading to high litter productivity just as the deer population was depressed because of winterkill.

"We had a pulse of kittens hit the ground that summer," Wenum said. The following year, those kittens were "kicked off" by their mothers.

"We had a lot of inexperienced juveniles, with minimal hunting skills and no territories, and the prey base was depressed," he said. "With those things coupled together, we started having a lot of lion problems, lions in back yards looking at dogs and cats."

Wenum doesn't recall how many lions were dispatched, but it was "a lot."

The lion population declined in response to the lack of prey, and since then the region's deer population recovered.

"Our deer population recovered three to four years ago," but there is typically a lag time for the predator population to respond, Wenum said. "It's taken us until now to actually recover predator numbers. They are young, inexperienced cats and they don't have a territory and they are bouncing around looking at cats and dogs."

The young cats " and in some cases old cats that have been displaced from their territories by more dominant lions " struggle the most between August and November.

That is when deer are at their healthiest and more scattered, making them difficult to hunt. Deer are easier to hunt during the winter, Wenum said, giving young lions a better chance at survival.

Most of the skulls and hides from the lions in the Fish, Wildlife and Parks freezer will be saved and distributed to schools, visitor centers and other destinations as "educational props," Wenum said.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com