Tracking Note Transcript
- For about a decade, I've been researching mountain lions for an organization called MPG Ranch. MPG is a privately owned conservation organization. We manage 16 and a half thousand acres in the northern sapphires on the east side of Bitterroot Valley. And we're set up a lot more like a biological research station than a ranch. We don't actually ranch anything. What we're looking to do is discover best practices for large scale habitat restoration. And to that end, we're studying everything from soil microbes through the plants and the pollinators and the bears and the mountain lions and the birds. We go all the way down to the Bitterroot River in the west, so we have that riparian habitat. Moving east up into grasslands, which was former agricultural land, then into sage brush step, and moving east into Davis Creek, we get into a lot of forested habitat that's really rugged and saw a lot of timber work in the past. This place is incredibly biologically diverse. There's an incredible amount of birds, songbirds, raptors. We had a grizzly bear, we have a lot of black bears on the property, we have wolves occasionally, quite a few mountain lions, and we even have a wolverine that moved through. There are feral horses on the property too. MPG has an extensive camera network and we have them placed in really strategic locations that are high traffic areas, and we have them there throughout the year and for years. And because of this, we are able to get this really intimate glimpse into how animals use the landscape.
- My name's Maggie Hirschauer, and I've been with the Mountain Lion Project for three seasons now. I also work at the MPG Ranch in the summer where I manage the Bitterroot Monarch Project. And mostly we conduct breeding phenology surveys, but in the winters, I track mountain lions. When we walk through the woods, we create these concentric rings around us that kind of call out our presence. And it takes a lot of effort to be still and quiet, to be able to see the natural world as if we weren't there. Being able to put cameras in the woods and go back and watch everything that happened in a specific spot is kind of a little miracle. It's not the same as being there, but it lets you witness things that you could never otherwise see. Going back through the cards from these cameras gives you so much insight into these places and the life that inhabits them. Tracking notes, December 28th, 2015. I installed a camera today on a log that I've seen a fox come out of several times now. It's a cool spot and I'm anxious to see what other animals I might find in the area. These cameras give us a glimpse into the lives of animals, the way that they interact with each other, with different species, but also the way that they interact with the landscape and through time. It's cool to see how a place can just totally transform from one time of year to the next. The animals do this too, going through their seasonal changes. The weasels and the snowshoe hares start turning brown again after a winter of being snow white.
- The first sample we collected was on an individual, F4, who we came to call Oma, and she's the oldest cat in the study by far. And we collected this sample from a bed site when we were really just still developing the project. And so she was the only sample we collected that year, and that was in the winter of 2012, so December of 2012. And at this point, she may not be in the study anymore. We didn't collect a sample from her two winters ago. I don't have last winter's samples back. She is reaching the 11 to 13 year old age range of a wild mountain lion. So she's the original matriarch of this area. In January of 2013, a family of lions took down a mule deer buck on the front side of the property. And this family group, to the best of our knowledge, is where the story for F2, or Willow, begins. We have a mother and two young kittens on this kill, and we start really collecting solid DNA on this family group the following year. But based on what we know of how many family groups were on the ranch at that point in time and how many kittens they each had, we feel pretty confident that this is where Willow's story starts for us. One of the ways that mountain lions communicate with each other is through these chirping sounds. I've only ever heard this between females and their offspring, but they sound like birds. Based on what we were seeing with this family group, it looks like they were staying together based on the DNA we have. We were collecting DNA on them as a group across the front side of the ranch, even into 2014. F2 came to be known as Willow because as she grew up, she grew really tall, really thin, and that's how I'm able to pick her out when she shows up on camera. She just grew into this lanky, long-limbed cat. And so thinking of her as being willowy, I started calling her Willow. Unfortunately, in the winter of 2014, Willow loses her mother and her sibling to hunters. MPG borders both private and public land, and the mountain lions wander off our property onto these adjacent lands all the time. Both of these cats were killed in legal hunts off of MPG. But Willow survives. We believe that she was still traveling with her mother at this time. So we think that that family group wasn't completely dispersed when she was orphaned. She then moves off the front side of the ranch into the more rugged and steep and secluded areas on the property. And now she is in Oma's territory, and she's being tolerated there as a young, juvenile cat, her first winter on her own.
- [Maggie] In the winter of 2018, we put cameras on a fox den that we've known to be active. Dens seem to rotate usage throughout the year. Skunks and foxes in particular seem to use the same dens at different times. And when there's no other resident, hares and squirrels and smaller forest animals usually hang around too. Foxes will often start to come by the den in mid-winter, usually around December, and check it out and mark it. And eventually, they just seem to post up there and wait for a mate. They can easily sleep for more than 12 hours at a time while they're waiting. Foxes are so cool. They're like dog hardware running cat software. Once they've found each other, they'll spend more time at the den taking turns sleeping as they excavate and prepare the den for a litter of pups in the spring. Squirrels often continue to live in their nearby nests, even when the foxes are in residence and they seem to coexist. Maybe the foxes even benefit from their vigilance and alarms about other predators. The squirrel that lives near this den, like all squirrels, has favorite routes through the forest mapped out. This one always runs up the log that lies to the side of the den.
- I started tracking as a boy with my dad and my brother walking through the winter woods. And what really struck me was that there's a story there in the snow. That lit me up and I love that, the idea that I can piece together a story from what's left behind, by the movement of animals on the forest floor when I'm away. And so I'll head out into the winter woods And in that snow is written the story of everything that has happened. And if you have the skills and the ability to interpret that, you can really read a lot from what took place there. We based this project in non-invasive protocols that were pioneered by Dr. Mike Sawaya in a study that he ran in the Yellowstone ecosystem following collared cats and comparing that data with his non-invasive sampling. We don't handle cats, we don't collar cats, and we backtrack cats when we find a track line in the snow. And so what that means is when we find a track in the snow, we determine direction of travel of that individual and we go the opposite direction because we want to limit disturbance, we don't want to push them, we don't want to bump them off kills, anything like that. And then while we are out there following the cats in the snow, we are tracking ourselves with the GPS units. And when we encounter a cat track, we drop a way point. And when we lose that cat track or we end our day, we drop another way point and we're able to bring these segments in and create maps so we that know how the mountain lions are using the land. And then writing a tracker log at the end of the day. And these field reports, that need to go out to everyone, detail what that day's experience was like, what they found, and if we need to follow up on anything.
- [Tyler] Tracking notes, February 5th, 2016. Went from Miller 1 to the west and into Davis Creek today. Right when I hit the bottom of Davis Creek, I found a cougar track. I backtracked it for about 200 yards to the creek, then began seeing approximately 1 million little cougar tracks. It turns out the female cougar with the kittens had a kill there. I found the drag mark from where the deer was killed to where it was consumed. Judging from the fresh blood on the surface of the snow and the hardness of the crust while it was dragged, I think the deer was just killed two to three days ago. I found four sets of kitten tracks crossing the meadow to the north and going up onto a south facing hillside. I set up two game cameras at the site.
- I send out emails when the weather is terrible and it's like 30 below and the wind chill is awful. And I type up these emails, "Please don't go out tracking today. You will freeze and die." And still at the end of the day, I get tracking reports and you know, and they're always like, "Oh, it's so brutal out there and we followed..." But they follow cats still in these ridiculous weather conditions.
- [Tyler] T-shirt weather today, starting in the mid-teens, but getting to the high thirties in the afternoon with clear skies.
- [Joshua] And while we're out tracking, we're also collecting hair and scat opportunistically for genetic material to identify. And eventually all of this goes to the Rocky Mountain Research Station and we hand it off to Kristy Pilgrim and she and her team analyze all of this data to be able to tell us which individuals we've collected samples on. And it's that information that allows us to understand how many residents we have, how they are all related, and how many transients we have.
- There are many studies that now incorporate both noninvasive genetic sampling as well as camera data. But I would say the MPG project is unique in the sense of having so many cameras on the property as well as all of Josh's intensive field efforts for tracking individuals. So that does make this study a little bit different because we do have this really wonderful marriage between the knowledge that we get from the field and the knowledge we can get from the lab and bringing those pieces together to really have an informed picture of what's going on. Because it's also very difficult, generally speaking, to look at relatedness of wild populations, of individuals in a wild population. But what's really unique about this project is that there's so much knowledge about potential relationships of individuals and ages of individuals and following everybody through time.
- In the summer of 2015, Willow breeds with a male, and she has her first kitten in the fall, and her first offspring is F9, who we call Sula. The first footage we get of Sula is as a young kitten with her mother on a kill site in January of 2016. She looks to be probably about three months old at this point. So we believe she was born sometime in the October-November range. We were able to get cameras on a number of kills that we know had Willow and Sula together at these kill sites.
- [Tyler] Tracking notes, January 13th, 2016. Went back into the bottom of Davis to try to figure out if the cougars had a kill in there. I found the kill about a hundred yards downstream of the area where I'd seen all the tracks last night. The dead deer is actually down in the creek, but it was killed on the second road to the north and then dragged there. At the kill site, there were multiple beds and excessive evidence of play by the young, demonstrated by tracks running up leaning trees and jumping off, concrete hard circles of tracks running around trees, and broken limbs all over. I set up two game cameras at the site. Tracking notes January 10th, 2016. Yesterday I found fresh cougar tracks of a mom and juvenile, likely the same ones I'd been previously tracking. Today, I started on their backtrack. In less than a mile, I found a deer carcass that I presume they had killed.
- What we also started to see was the potential of resource sharing. One of our trackers, Tyler, went into a kill site to replace a camera and ended up bumping a cat off of this kill site. He collected DNA from that site. And because of what he saw in the track record and what we saw on camera footage, it seemed to us that there were multiple individuals at this site, and we just assumed everyone was related, didn't think much more about it, but then the genetics come back and the lab identifies Oma, Sula, and Willow all at this same kill site. Oma is not related to Sula or Willow. Oma tolerated Willow, and continues to, in her territory and is now also tolerating Sula as well. But they're not related. So that's what makes this something so unique. A lot of the conventional wisdom around mountain lions is that they are extremely territorial and really solitary and that they just avoid each other. We couldn't definitively say that they were there at the same time sharing the resource, but this is the first moment that that light bulb goes off and we think something's happening here that is interesting and potentially rare. Tyler's been on the crew for a number of years. He's amazing. He puts in the longest days and hikes the longest miles and seems to find the coolest stuff. So he's been really indispensable to the study and he's continually bringing in amazing footage or locating dens and he's been giving me detailed tracking reports for years.
- [Tyler] Tracking Notes, February 25th, 2017. Went to Woodchuck 1 today to change cards and batteries in one camera and put up three more on other den sites. I went to change supplies in the camera in the first den, which is located in the south part of Davis Creek. Just before I got to the den, I saw pretty fresh bobcat tracks. When I got to the den, there were tracks of a bobcat entering the den, then leaving it, leading me to believe the den was empty. As I was about to start messing with the camera, I heard a noise in the den and a cougar came charging out. Holy fuck! Apparently there's another way into the den. Checking the tracks later, the cougar came in from the top of the den. I adjusted the camera angle for this additional entrance. Ironically, no large mammals have approached the den from the front since I put the camera up in December until last night at six when the bobcat came, and then there was a cougar sleeping in it today.
- [Maggie] Meanwhile, the foxes are still hanging out at their den. They usually mate in late January or early February, and then bond and hunt together during the roughly two month gestation period. Often one of them will wait at the den while the other hunts. Fox pups are born blind and deaf in the den, and they need their mother's body heat for the first two to three weeks of life. During this period, the male does the hunting and brings her food. Sometimes he just leaves it at the mouth of the den, but sometimes she meets him with an elaborate display of excitement and what seems like gratitude.
- So later in 2016, Willow and Sula are still roaming around together. In the fall of 2016, Willow has her second litter and their number designations are F16 through F19. And so we just collectively call them the teens because we refer to them as a group together all the time. Average dispersal age is 15 months. And so to have two litters back-to-back, one fall following the other, is not normally how it goes, because suddenly that mother is now in a position where she has newly dependent kittens and a still dependent juvenile. And so now you have a mixed family group of different ages. Only two of the teens actually survived that winter, F17 and F19. And so Sula is probably about 10 months old when her mother breeds, about a year old when the new kittens are born, and we start seeing them traveling together and we start documenting this mixed-age group. We started getting this footage out of Davis Creek of this mixed family group together. We have this really distinctive large ponderosa, and this family group goes past it, and we can see clearly that Sula is following Willow and the teens and they're all traveling together.
- Some of the really interesting things coming out of this study are where we have female 2, who had a daughter several years ago, female 9, and then Josh would see her on camera with this adult female and then new kittens, and then kind of an older sub-adult still hanging out. And then we were able to get the genetic identifications from scats from those individuals and confirm that it's F9 and she's still, for years, kind of hanging out with her mom and being tolerated by her mom both at kill sites and while her mom has new kittens. So that's one of the super exciting things for me in the lab, is I get to be able to track these individuals through time. And year after year, see who showed up where, and who's just still out there.
- At this point, we really weren't sure what the future was going to hold for Sula. She was obviously very dependent on her mother. She continued to follow her around even into the next tracking season. We weren't certain if she would be able to disperse and be a successful hunter or provide for herself, which is why we were so surprised when we finally saw what happened. Mountain lions are incredibly secretive. They're stalk and ambush predators, they move through the landscape generally at a walk, and they move really quietly through the forests, and they can freeze at any point in their movement, and then they'll get really, really close to their prey, and then close that distance with a burst of speed. Young males will eat just about anything. They're fresh out of their natal range, they're looking for territory, and they have a pretty malleable understanding of what food actually is. These are the individuals who are more likely to get tangled up with a porcupine or eat a lot of grouse or something more random. But mostly, mountain lions specialize in deer and elk.
- [Maggie] I'd say elk are one of the more spectacular animals out there. They're highly social and so fast and strong. And their bugles in the fall are one of the most haunting sounds you'll ever hear. It's always been amazing to me that mountain lions, not only are capable of killing elk, but that they do so regularly. There's a fair bit of risk to a lion in going after pray that big and powerful, and you'd think that they would just stick to smaller deer. But adult lions in their prime seem to have no problem killing elk, even bull elk, and that's a lot of meat, especially if you're feeding dependent young.
- They're incredible hunters. So they're just able to really capitalize on these opportunities. We also see them in close proximity to elk, either chasing them when they're hunting them or if they're relaxing, sometimes you'll have the sounds of the herd nearby, and you'll know that they're always pretty close to their prey. We have hundreds of cameras on the landscape that have been collecting imagery for 10 years. We've caught mountain lions hunting four times. Mountain lions end up providing food resources for a lot of things because mountain lions will be subordinate to a pack of wolves or bears, so they'll run off a kill and leave that and feed everybody else. But in terms of fox or coyote or badgers or any smaller creatures coming in, a mountain lion is going to be dominant, and a mountain lion is going to defend that kill and will easily kill a coyote or badger. We see coyotes coming in and fox coming in and they're really skittish, they're on high alert. They'll feed a little bit and they'll look around, they'll feed a little bit and they'll look around, and it's because they're under threat. If you have a large, incredibly secretive and stealth hunter and you know you're on their kill, I mean, they can smell them, they know they're around, they know that they're trying to sneak a meal, you're putting yourself in a risky situation. We have documented instances of mountain lions running bobcats off of kills. We have documented them killing coyotes on multiple occasions to the point where sometimes I feel like they're out to get 'em. And we just last winter documented a mountain lion killing a badger. And what we think happened was the badger came in to try to get a meal and was surprised by the mountain lion. Ultimately, all of these animals are inhabiting the same landscape and they encounter each other, frequently. In the fall of 2018, Willow has another litter of kittens. She uses an area that we call the Mistletoe Den, and it's actually, it's a bed site, really. They don't spend a lot of time there, they pass through, it provides some shelter. We maintain a camera there year round. And so we see an incredible amount of animals making use of this spot. We picked this spot out because we get some of the youngest mountain lion footage that we've had of kittens at this site. She's the only mountain lion we know of who uses this spot and she must have a natal den somewhere nearby. We get this imagery of what appears to be Willow with two kittens, and we pull DNA, we know it's Willow, and we get one kitten in the DNA identification. We assume she only has at most two kittens in this litter. However, it turns out that she may have a lot more. So I get this call, it was like a Saturday morning, and I get this call from Tyler, and he is just beside himself excited. You know, like, "Oh my God, oh my God. You have to see what I just got off of this camera." It's February, it's six degrees, it's the middle of the night, there's three feet of snow on the ground, and an elk walks into frame with a mountain lion hanging off of its neck with Willow hanging off of its neck. So we have this 20 minute struggle play out in front of this camera, and this mountain lion manages to drop this elk directly in front of her den. In this series of videos, we have a female mountain lion, say she's 100 pounds, taking down a spike bull elk, we'll say he's 400 pounds, and she's wrestling him down by strangling him slowly while this elk is trying to stomp her and kick her and throw her. If she gets injured, she can potentially not hunt for a while until she recovers. If she can't recover, she's done for and her kittens are done for. This is incredibly risky behavior, and they do it all the time. And we happened to catch it on video. And then as the daylight footage starts to appear, all these little kitten heads are popping up and they're wandering through the frame and they've got rounded out bellies and bloody faces. And we realize that this mother has six kittens. And this is unheard of. The family group feeds on that elk for a week, maybe a little bit more. And then what we begin to see is that they're moving between different den sites in the area. In this area in Davis Creek, we have these three dens that are really close to each other, they're less than half a mile apart, each of them. And we see Willow at one point leave the kill site, and it appears like she goes off on her own to scout one of these other dens. She shows up on camera there by herself, and then returns the next day or a couple days after with all of her kittens in tow. The average litter size for mountain lion is one to four with an average survival rate of one to two individuals out of any given litter. So the fact that we have a mother raising six, whether there is some form of adoption that takes place, or she just has six kittens, the fact that she's raising six is unbelievable. What we begin to realize reviewing the footage is that the mother is moving her young to this other den site and then back, and then to another den site, and then back. And the kittens will sometimes move independently back to the kill site and then will return to another den. And at different points, we see kittens get left behind for a little while, get picked back up by mom. And what we're realizing is that in this area at least, that the kittens are not as tethered to their mother as you would expect, they're surprisingly independent, but this has consequences. And twice, we find kittens get left behind. One time for a very short period of time, the mother returns, picks that kitten back up, and they move on. But later in the winter, we have this footage of a kitten that's left at a den site for an extended period of time and goes out and cries for its mother, and then goes back into the den and comes out and cries for its mother and does this repeatedly. The kitten finally just wanders off. And that's where the footage ends.
- Springtime out here is just incredible. The metal larks are singing and busy nesting. Cute baby animals are bumbling around everywhere. First the hills turn gold with balsamroot and then we see these successive waves of flowers. There's the purple lupine, the pink paintbrush. Sometimes it just feels like the meadows are buzzing with life. And then the bitterroots bloom. The bitterroots are these really cool, small, pink flowers and they only bloom for a couple of days every year. They close up every night and then open in the morning. Spring can be really hard too, though. We don't tend to understand the natural cycle of life very well. And when we're diligent observers, it can be hard to realize that the flurry of life exists to feed other life as much as it does for its own sake. After about four weeks, the fox pups first venture above ground. Once the pups are mobile, the male doesn't seem to stick around long and the female takes over the hunting duties. She spends a lot of time out hunting and they are amazing hunters. Over and over again, she goes out and comes back with meals for the pups. The pups are pretty competitive and voracious when feeding time comes around. Mortality rates vary for different fox populations, but only somewhere around half of fox pups will reach adulthood. The mother can't divide up the meals and so they learn to be aggressive if they want to eat.
- [Joshua] We had that group of Willow and the six kittens on camera in February when we first meet them, and we see them throughout the winter showing up at these different dens. But then we get really clear imagery again in April by a stream. We were worried in the winter about this abandoned kitten. Was it lost? Did it survive? It wanders off into the snow... and we see then in later spring that the entire group is reunited. So the mother must have come by and picked that straggler kitten up. We have in Davis Creek, the mother plus clearly six kittens together. So the entire group is reunited at this point. The Davis Creek footage is so remarkable. It was the one that really solidified it for us that this is a single mother raising six kittens. And then we keep seeing them here and there and here and there through Davis Creek and in different places. And she manages to raise this group to adulthood. Now she's the only one hunting for this group, and hunting is a dangerous business if you're a mountain lion. The risks are enormous and it could end her and it could end her family. And she has to do this consistently to feed this giant family. We've only collected DNA on two of the kittens out of that litter of six and confirmed that they're related to Willow. It's really hard to sample every individual, and the DNA is often not good enough to get us to that individual level, which can be really frustrating because I want all of the pieces of the puzzle and it's rare that I get them. But we know at least those two kittens were sired by M20. We seem to lose the territorial male every year in this study to hunting activity. Last year we had this really distinctive cat come onto the ranch, M44. He's short, he's squat, and his ears look like they were damaged from frostbite, so he was very distinctive and he stands out. And then later in the spring, he shows up again at a fox den. And there were foxes at the den at the time. And so we see these kits playing outside just before he comes through. And then we actually see the mother fox sitting at the den with the lion in view in the background and she's barking a warning at it.
- [Maggie] Mountain lions can be a real danger to foxes and especially young foxes. But M44 passed by and the next day, the foxes were back about their business. Over the course of a season, it's fun to see how the foxes react to the various animals that move through the woods around them. Lions, bears, coyotes, and wolves are all potentially dangerous. And you can see the active interest the mother takes when she smells the other predators that have passed by. It's dangerous for her to leave the pups alone while she hunts, but there's no other way for her to provide the food that they need and that she needs. She's protective of her pups, and you can see her caution when she comes back to the den, surveying the area for danger and sniffing around before causing her pups to scramble into the open as she arrives to feed them. Two of the pups were killed and another two were not seen again. The remaining pup only showed eye shine at night in one eye and seems to have lost or damaged the other one. The lion appears to have been a transient cat that was just passing through. It covered up the pups like it was caching a food source and returned to pluck fur and feed that evening and the next day. But then the mother moved the pup's body and the cat moved on. The mother and remaining pup moved. But the mother came back three more times. Each time she went and looked into the main den entrance. Maybe someday we'll have a better idea of what animals think and feel. The following year, about a mile away, we were filming a bobcat. It had found a dead deer and had been trying to navigate this surly moose along with larger predators to try to get in and scavenge this carcass. And one night, a one-eyed fox showed up on the scene. It's impossible to say, but I like to think that at least one of those fox pups is still running around these mountains doing fox things.
- In the fall of 2019, we found a kill where a lion had brought down a spike elk in a wallow. And this presented us with a really unique situation because these mountain lions were not able to get this elk out of the wallow, they tried, but they could not do it. So they're forced to feed in the open. And we had this incredible filming opportunity. We're also able to collect DNA off of that site and determine which individuals were there. And what we found was... Sula. And three kittens, her three kittens. And we have well documented her and her family group feeding on this elk. So what we also see is an unrelated male comes in and shares this kill with Sula and her family. For the first time, we have proof, video evidence, of resource sharing with non-related individuals. This whole kill scenario was not ideal for these cats. They have an elk in a big pool of mud water and they don't want to get their feet wet. And so you'd have one individual on the elk feeding, others sleeping nearby, and then there'd be some sort of a cue that feeding was done and then other individuals would would kind of race in there to try to get their turn at the kill. And this all worked out really well until they were able to drag the kill out of the wallow and consume it a little bit more quickly. And as the food resource disappeared, tensions increased and we begin to see tolerance diminish between the related and unrelated individual. Never do we see anyone actually follow through on violence. There's a lot of bluffing, there's a lot of noise, but they work it out and they still share that kill. The last night on the kill is complete with a lot of tension as the resource becomes increasingly scarce and everybody wants to get the last little bit of scrap. The next morning we see the family group come in, they're a tight unit, and we have that unrelated individual just removed a little bit. Everybody's tense and competitive for scraps. And then we see the family group leave. And they go together and a period of time passes and then that lone male follows them down the exact same track. The conventional wisdom is that cats are very solitary and they won't share their food resources and they're incredibly territorial. And we see this definitely, a competition for food resources. Even as kittens, they'll fight ferociously to establish dominance and establish who gets to feed. And family members can fight amongst themselves at a kill. We see a lot of noise, a lot of bluffing, a lot of aggression, a lot of attempts at creating dominance at a kill site. But ultimately, what we also see is a reciprocal relationship where if I'm successful and you're having no luck, I may share with you. And then that is returned. And so these relationships form and it increases the potential survival for everyone. Mountain lions are obligate carnivores. They have to eat meat. So if they don't make a kill, they can't just go get something else. They have to either make a kill, share a kill, or scavenge. It's becoming increasingly clear that mountain lions have a more robust social structure than we would typically want to give them credit for. We found a spot where a drainage constricts and seems to really funnel animals through into this bottleneck. It is a prime travel corridor. We found the remains of six or seven elk killed there over the seasons. And this year a cat managed to kill a cow and a calf, presumably related, but hard to say for sure. It's likely that the cat killed one and then when the other came back looking, the cat killed it too. When we found found it, the calf was partially consumed but the cow was cached whole. The mountain lion at this kill was F27, one of Willow's giant litter of six from a couple of years before. We had cameras up on these two kills for many weeks. And one day another adult cat showed up. It fed for an afternoon, and that night, F17 returned and they fed in peace together. They shared the kill through the night and in the morning the other cat was gone. Genetic sampling revealed that cat to be Sula. So both cats are the offspring of Willow from litters a few years apart by different males. We had no prior indication of them having ever encountered each other before. It's just another example of how complex the social life of mountain lions really is. It seems clear that with overlapping territories, our residents are all well aware of each other. Last winter, we put cameras up at all of Willow's known den sites and she never showed up. Some other cats stopped by and they investigated here and there, but we just never saw Willow. She was noticeably absent from her usual territory. I spent a lot of time in there and I didn't see her tracks. And we haven't sampled her now in over a year. So there's a very real chance that she's gone. And yeah, there's something sad about thinking that that story has ended. But all things change. There are a lot of things out there that can kill a mountain lion. She could get injured during a hunt and not be able to feed herself and starve. She could be killed by hunters, as often happens. And as mountain lions get older, they experience some pretty significant tooth wear. After about age eight, the tools they rely on to hunt and to feed themselves are going to be significantly smaller and significantly less effective. So this cat ultimately will not be able to feed herself as well. It's easy to get sucked into rooting for the predator or the prey. And if we watch a mountain lion take down some beautiful deer, we feel really conflicted. But I don't think it's that simple, it's not black or white out here, there are no heroes or villains. The predator doesn't have it any easier than the prey. Their life depends on that interaction, just the same.
- You can't untangle it all. All you can do is bear witness and try to learn something about the world. 'Cause ultimately these are the same realities that are underpinning our lives as well.
- Willow may be gone, but in a very real way, her offspring carry her story forward out here. Sula, the teens, that giant litter that she had, all of those cats are still out here on this landscape. They're hunting the same drainages, they're using the same dens, they're using the skills that she taught them to survive. So I like to think of it that her story carries on.
- [Tyler] Tracking Notes, December 10th, 2021. First day of the season. Got a couple inches of fresh snow last night and caught a track right away this morning. Followed it into the back of Davis, but lost daylight.
- My name's Maggie Hirschauer, and I've been with the Mountain Lion Project for three seasons now. I also work at the MPG Ranch in the summer where I manage the Bitterroot Monarch Project. And mostly we conduct breeding phenology surveys, but in the winters, I track mountain lions. When we walk through the woods, we create these concentric rings around us that kind of call out our presence. And it takes a lot of effort to be still and quiet, to be able to see the natural world as if we weren't there. Being able to put cameras in the woods and go back and watch everything that happened in a specific spot is kind of a little miracle. It's not the same as being there, but it lets you witness things that you could never otherwise see. Going back through the cards from these cameras gives you so much insight into these places and the life that inhabits them. Tracking notes, December 28th, 2015. I installed a camera today on a log that I've seen a fox come out of several times now. It's a cool spot and I'm anxious to see what other animals I might find in the area. These cameras give us a glimpse into the lives of animals, the way that they interact with each other, with different species, but also the way that they interact with the landscape and through time. It's cool to see how a place can just totally transform from one time of year to the next. The animals do this too, going through their seasonal changes. The weasels and the snowshoe hares start turning brown again after a winter of being snow white.
- The first sample we collected was on an individual, F4, who we came to call Oma, and she's the oldest cat in the study by far. And we collected this sample from a bed site when we were really just still developing the project. And so she was the only sample we collected that year, and that was in the winter of 2012, so December of 2012. And at this point, she may not be in the study anymore. We didn't collect a sample from her two winters ago. I don't have last winter's samples back. She is reaching the 11 to 13 year old age range of a wild mountain lion. So she's the original matriarch of this area. In January of 2013, a family of lions took down a mule deer buck on the front side of the property. And this family group, to the best of our knowledge, is where the story for F2, or Willow, begins. We have a mother and two young kittens on this kill, and we start really collecting solid DNA on this family group the following year. But based on what we know of how many family groups were on the ranch at that point in time and how many kittens they each had, we feel pretty confident that this is where Willow's story starts for us. One of the ways that mountain lions communicate with each other is through these chirping sounds. I've only ever heard this between females and their offspring, but they sound like birds. Based on what we were seeing with this family group, it looks like they were staying together based on the DNA we have. We were collecting DNA on them as a group across the front side of the ranch, even into 2014. F2 came to be known as Willow because as she grew up, she grew really tall, really thin, and that's how I'm able to pick her out when she shows up on camera. She just grew into this lanky, long-limbed cat. And so thinking of her as being willowy, I started calling her Willow. Unfortunately, in the winter of 2014, Willow loses her mother and her sibling to hunters. MPG borders both private and public land, and the mountain lions wander off our property onto these adjacent lands all the time. Both of these cats were killed in legal hunts off of MPG. But Willow survives. We believe that she was still traveling with her mother at this time. So we think that that family group wasn't completely dispersed when she was orphaned. She then moves off the front side of the ranch into the more rugged and steep and secluded areas on the property. And now she is in Oma's territory, and she's being tolerated there as a young, juvenile cat, her first winter on her own.
- [Maggie] In the winter of 2018, we put cameras on a fox den that we've known to be active. Dens seem to rotate usage throughout the year. Skunks and foxes in particular seem to use the same dens at different times. And when there's no other resident, hares and squirrels and smaller forest animals usually hang around too. Foxes will often start to come by the den in mid-winter, usually around December, and check it out and mark it. And eventually, they just seem to post up there and wait for a mate. They can easily sleep for more than 12 hours at a time while they're waiting. Foxes are so cool. They're like dog hardware running cat software. Once they've found each other, they'll spend more time at the den taking turns sleeping as they excavate and prepare the den for a litter of pups in the spring. Squirrels often continue to live in their nearby nests, even when the foxes are in residence and they seem to coexist. Maybe the foxes even benefit from their vigilance and alarms about other predators. The squirrel that lives near this den, like all squirrels, has favorite routes through the forest mapped out. This one always runs up the log that lies to the side of the den.
- I started tracking as a boy with my dad and my brother walking through the winter woods. And what really struck me was that there's a story there in the snow. That lit me up and I love that, the idea that I can piece together a story from what's left behind, by the movement of animals on the forest floor when I'm away. And so I'll head out into the winter woods And in that snow is written the story of everything that has happened. And if you have the skills and the ability to interpret that, you can really read a lot from what took place there. We based this project in non-invasive protocols that were pioneered by Dr. Mike Sawaya in a study that he ran in the Yellowstone ecosystem following collared cats and comparing that data with his non-invasive sampling. We don't handle cats, we don't collar cats, and we backtrack cats when we find a track line in the snow. And so what that means is when we find a track in the snow, we determine direction of travel of that individual and we go the opposite direction because we want to limit disturbance, we don't want to push them, we don't want to bump them off kills, anything like that. And then while we are out there following the cats in the snow, we are tracking ourselves with the GPS units. And when we encounter a cat track, we drop a way point. And when we lose that cat track or we end our day, we drop another way point and we're able to bring these segments in and create maps so we that know how the mountain lions are using the land. And then writing a tracker log at the end of the day. And these field reports, that need to go out to everyone, detail what that day's experience was like, what they found, and if we need to follow up on anything.
- [Tyler] Tracking notes, February 5th, 2016. Went from Miller 1 to the west and into Davis Creek today. Right when I hit the bottom of Davis Creek, I found a cougar track. I backtracked it for about 200 yards to the creek, then began seeing approximately 1 million little cougar tracks. It turns out the female cougar with the kittens had a kill there. I found the drag mark from where the deer was killed to where it was consumed. Judging from the fresh blood on the surface of the snow and the hardness of the crust while it was dragged, I think the deer was just killed two to three days ago. I found four sets of kitten tracks crossing the meadow to the north and going up onto a south facing hillside. I set up two game cameras at the site.
- I send out emails when the weather is terrible and it's like 30 below and the wind chill is awful. And I type up these emails, "Please don't go out tracking today. You will freeze and die." And still at the end of the day, I get tracking reports and you know, and they're always like, "Oh, it's so brutal out there and we followed..." But they follow cats still in these ridiculous weather conditions.
- [Tyler] T-shirt weather today, starting in the mid-teens, but getting to the high thirties in the afternoon with clear skies.
- [Joshua] And while we're out tracking, we're also collecting hair and scat opportunistically for genetic material to identify. And eventually all of this goes to the Rocky Mountain Research Station and we hand it off to Kristy Pilgrim and she and her team analyze all of this data to be able to tell us which individuals we've collected samples on. And it's that information that allows us to understand how many residents we have, how they are all related, and how many transients we have.
- There are many studies that now incorporate both noninvasive genetic sampling as well as camera data. But I would say the MPG project is unique in the sense of having so many cameras on the property as well as all of Josh's intensive field efforts for tracking individuals. So that does make this study a little bit different because we do have this really wonderful marriage between the knowledge that we get from the field and the knowledge we can get from the lab and bringing those pieces together to really have an informed picture of what's going on. Because it's also very difficult, generally speaking, to look at relatedness of wild populations, of individuals in a wild population. But what's really unique about this project is that there's so much knowledge about potential relationships of individuals and ages of individuals and following everybody through time.
- In the summer of 2015, Willow breeds with a male, and she has her first kitten in the fall, and her first offspring is F9, who we call Sula. The first footage we get of Sula is as a young kitten with her mother on a kill site in January of 2016. She looks to be probably about three months old at this point. So we believe she was born sometime in the October-November range. We were able to get cameras on a number of kills that we know had Willow and Sula together at these kill sites.
- [Tyler] Tracking notes, January 13th, 2016. Went back into the bottom of Davis to try to figure out if the cougars had a kill in there. I found the kill about a hundred yards downstream of the area where I'd seen all the tracks last night. The dead deer is actually down in the creek, but it was killed on the second road to the north and then dragged there. At the kill site, there were multiple beds and excessive evidence of play by the young, demonstrated by tracks running up leaning trees and jumping off, concrete hard circles of tracks running around trees, and broken limbs all over. I set up two game cameras at the site. Tracking notes January 10th, 2016. Yesterday I found fresh cougar tracks of a mom and juvenile, likely the same ones I'd been previously tracking. Today, I started on their backtrack. In less than a mile, I found a deer carcass that I presume they had killed.
- What we also started to see was the potential of resource sharing. One of our trackers, Tyler, went into a kill site to replace a camera and ended up bumping a cat off of this kill site. He collected DNA from that site. And because of what he saw in the track record and what we saw on camera footage, it seemed to us that there were multiple individuals at this site, and we just assumed everyone was related, didn't think much more about it, but then the genetics come back and the lab identifies Oma, Sula, and Willow all at this same kill site. Oma is not related to Sula or Willow. Oma tolerated Willow, and continues to, in her territory and is now also tolerating Sula as well. But they're not related. So that's what makes this something so unique. A lot of the conventional wisdom around mountain lions is that they are extremely territorial and really solitary and that they just avoid each other. We couldn't definitively say that they were there at the same time sharing the resource, but this is the first moment that that light bulb goes off and we think something's happening here that is interesting and potentially rare. Tyler's been on the crew for a number of years. He's amazing. He puts in the longest days and hikes the longest miles and seems to find the coolest stuff. So he's been really indispensable to the study and he's continually bringing in amazing footage or locating dens and he's been giving me detailed tracking reports for years.
- [Tyler] Tracking Notes, February 25th, 2017. Went to Woodchuck 1 today to change cards and batteries in one camera and put up three more on other den sites. I went to change supplies in the camera in the first den, which is located in the south part of Davis Creek. Just before I got to the den, I saw pretty fresh bobcat tracks. When I got to the den, there were tracks of a bobcat entering the den, then leaving it, leading me to believe the den was empty. As I was about to start messing with the camera, I heard a noise in the den and a cougar came charging out. Holy fuck! Apparently there's another way into the den. Checking the tracks later, the cougar came in from the top of the den. I adjusted the camera angle for this additional entrance. Ironically, no large mammals have approached the den from the front since I put the camera up in December until last night at six when the bobcat came, and then there was a cougar sleeping in it today.
- [Maggie] Meanwhile, the foxes are still hanging out at their den. They usually mate in late January or early February, and then bond and hunt together during the roughly two month gestation period. Often one of them will wait at the den while the other hunts. Fox pups are born blind and deaf in the den, and they need their mother's body heat for the first two to three weeks of life. During this period, the male does the hunting and brings her food. Sometimes he just leaves it at the mouth of the den, but sometimes she meets him with an elaborate display of excitement and what seems like gratitude.
- So later in 2016, Willow and Sula are still roaming around together. In the fall of 2016, Willow has her second litter and their number designations are F16 through F19. And so we just collectively call them the teens because we refer to them as a group together all the time. Average dispersal age is 15 months. And so to have two litters back-to-back, one fall following the other, is not normally how it goes, because suddenly that mother is now in a position where she has newly dependent kittens and a still dependent juvenile. And so now you have a mixed family group of different ages. Only two of the teens actually survived that winter, F17 and F19. And so Sula is probably about 10 months old when her mother breeds, about a year old when the new kittens are born, and we start seeing them traveling together and we start documenting this mixed-age group. We started getting this footage out of Davis Creek of this mixed family group together. We have this really distinctive large ponderosa, and this family group goes past it, and we can see clearly that Sula is following Willow and the teens and they're all traveling together.
- Some of the really interesting things coming out of this study are where we have female 2, who had a daughter several years ago, female 9, and then Josh would see her on camera with this adult female and then new kittens, and then kind of an older sub-adult still hanging out. And then we were able to get the genetic identifications from scats from those individuals and confirm that it's F9 and she's still, for years, kind of hanging out with her mom and being tolerated by her mom both at kill sites and while her mom has new kittens. So that's one of the super exciting things for me in the lab, is I get to be able to track these individuals through time. And year after year, see who showed up where, and who's just still out there.
- At this point, we really weren't sure what the future was going to hold for Sula. She was obviously very dependent on her mother. She continued to follow her around even into the next tracking season. We weren't certain if she would be able to disperse and be a successful hunter or provide for herself, which is why we were so surprised when we finally saw what happened. Mountain lions are incredibly secretive. They're stalk and ambush predators, they move through the landscape generally at a walk, and they move really quietly through the forests, and they can freeze at any point in their movement, and then they'll get really, really close to their prey, and then close that distance with a burst of speed. Young males will eat just about anything. They're fresh out of their natal range, they're looking for territory, and they have a pretty malleable understanding of what food actually is. These are the individuals who are more likely to get tangled up with a porcupine or eat a lot of grouse or something more random. But mostly, mountain lions specialize in deer and elk.
- [Maggie] I'd say elk are one of the more spectacular animals out there. They're highly social and so fast and strong. And their bugles in the fall are one of the most haunting sounds you'll ever hear. It's always been amazing to me that mountain lions, not only are capable of killing elk, but that they do so regularly. There's a fair bit of risk to a lion in going after pray that big and powerful, and you'd think that they would just stick to smaller deer. But adult lions in their prime seem to have no problem killing elk, even bull elk, and that's a lot of meat, especially if you're feeding dependent young.
- They're incredible hunters. So they're just able to really capitalize on these opportunities. We also see them in close proximity to elk, either chasing them when they're hunting them or if they're relaxing, sometimes you'll have the sounds of the herd nearby, and you'll know that they're always pretty close to their prey. We have hundreds of cameras on the landscape that have been collecting imagery for 10 years. We've caught mountain lions hunting four times. Mountain lions end up providing food resources for a lot of things because mountain lions will be subordinate to a pack of wolves or bears, so they'll run off a kill and leave that and feed everybody else. But in terms of fox or coyote or badgers or any smaller creatures coming in, a mountain lion is going to be dominant, and a mountain lion is going to defend that kill and will easily kill a coyote or badger. We see coyotes coming in and fox coming in and they're really skittish, they're on high alert. They'll feed a little bit and they'll look around, they'll feed a little bit and they'll look around, and it's because they're under threat. If you have a large, incredibly secretive and stealth hunter and you know you're on their kill, I mean, they can smell them, they know they're around, they know that they're trying to sneak a meal, you're putting yourself in a risky situation. We have documented instances of mountain lions running bobcats off of kills. We have documented them killing coyotes on multiple occasions to the point where sometimes I feel like they're out to get 'em. And we just last winter documented a mountain lion killing a badger. And what we think happened was the badger came in to try to get a meal and was surprised by the mountain lion. Ultimately, all of these animals are inhabiting the same landscape and they encounter each other, frequently. In the fall of 2018, Willow has another litter of kittens. She uses an area that we call the Mistletoe Den, and it's actually, it's a bed site, really. They don't spend a lot of time there, they pass through, it provides some shelter. We maintain a camera there year round. And so we see an incredible amount of animals making use of this spot. We picked this spot out because we get some of the youngest mountain lion footage that we've had of kittens at this site. She's the only mountain lion we know of who uses this spot and she must have a natal den somewhere nearby. We get this imagery of what appears to be Willow with two kittens, and we pull DNA, we know it's Willow, and we get one kitten in the DNA identification. We assume she only has at most two kittens in this litter. However, it turns out that she may have a lot more. So I get this call, it was like a Saturday morning, and I get this call from Tyler, and he is just beside himself excited. You know, like, "Oh my God, oh my God. You have to see what I just got off of this camera." It's February, it's six degrees, it's the middle of the night, there's three feet of snow on the ground, and an elk walks into frame with a mountain lion hanging off of its neck with Willow hanging off of its neck. So we have this 20 minute struggle play out in front of this camera, and this mountain lion manages to drop this elk directly in front of her den. In this series of videos, we have a female mountain lion, say she's 100 pounds, taking down a spike bull elk, we'll say he's 400 pounds, and she's wrestling him down by strangling him slowly while this elk is trying to stomp her and kick her and throw her. If she gets injured, she can potentially not hunt for a while until she recovers. If she can't recover, she's done for and her kittens are done for. This is incredibly risky behavior, and they do it all the time. And we happened to catch it on video. And then as the daylight footage starts to appear, all these little kitten heads are popping up and they're wandering through the frame and they've got rounded out bellies and bloody faces. And we realize that this mother has six kittens. And this is unheard of. The family group feeds on that elk for a week, maybe a little bit more. And then what we begin to see is that they're moving between different den sites in the area. In this area in Davis Creek, we have these three dens that are really close to each other, they're less than half a mile apart, each of them. And we see Willow at one point leave the kill site, and it appears like she goes off on her own to scout one of these other dens. She shows up on camera there by herself, and then returns the next day or a couple days after with all of her kittens in tow. The average litter size for mountain lion is one to four with an average survival rate of one to two individuals out of any given litter. So the fact that we have a mother raising six, whether there is some form of adoption that takes place, or she just has six kittens, the fact that she's raising six is unbelievable. What we begin to realize reviewing the footage is that the mother is moving her young to this other den site and then back, and then to another den site, and then back. And the kittens will sometimes move independently back to the kill site and then will return to another den. And at different points, we see kittens get left behind for a little while, get picked back up by mom. And what we're realizing is that in this area at least, that the kittens are not as tethered to their mother as you would expect, they're surprisingly independent, but this has consequences. And twice, we find kittens get left behind. One time for a very short period of time, the mother returns, picks that kitten back up, and they move on. But later in the winter, we have this footage of a kitten that's left at a den site for an extended period of time and goes out and cries for its mother, and then goes back into the den and comes out and cries for its mother and does this repeatedly. The kitten finally just wanders off. And that's where the footage ends.
- Springtime out here is just incredible. The metal larks are singing and busy nesting. Cute baby animals are bumbling around everywhere. First the hills turn gold with balsamroot and then we see these successive waves of flowers. There's the purple lupine, the pink paintbrush. Sometimes it just feels like the meadows are buzzing with life. And then the bitterroots bloom. The bitterroots are these really cool, small, pink flowers and they only bloom for a couple of days every year. They close up every night and then open in the morning. Spring can be really hard too, though. We don't tend to understand the natural cycle of life very well. And when we're diligent observers, it can be hard to realize that the flurry of life exists to feed other life as much as it does for its own sake. After about four weeks, the fox pups first venture above ground. Once the pups are mobile, the male doesn't seem to stick around long and the female takes over the hunting duties. She spends a lot of time out hunting and they are amazing hunters. Over and over again, she goes out and comes back with meals for the pups. The pups are pretty competitive and voracious when feeding time comes around. Mortality rates vary for different fox populations, but only somewhere around half of fox pups will reach adulthood. The mother can't divide up the meals and so they learn to be aggressive if they want to eat.
- [Joshua] We had that group of Willow and the six kittens on camera in February when we first meet them, and we see them throughout the winter showing up at these different dens. But then we get really clear imagery again in April by a stream. We were worried in the winter about this abandoned kitten. Was it lost? Did it survive? It wanders off into the snow... and we see then in later spring that the entire group is reunited. So the mother must have come by and picked that straggler kitten up. We have in Davis Creek, the mother plus clearly six kittens together. So the entire group is reunited at this point. The Davis Creek footage is so remarkable. It was the one that really solidified it for us that this is a single mother raising six kittens. And then we keep seeing them here and there and here and there through Davis Creek and in different places. And she manages to raise this group to adulthood. Now she's the only one hunting for this group, and hunting is a dangerous business if you're a mountain lion. The risks are enormous and it could end her and it could end her family. And she has to do this consistently to feed this giant family. We've only collected DNA on two of the kittens out of that litter of six and confirmed that they're related to Willow. It's really hard to sample every individual, and the DNA is often not good enough to get us to that individual level, which can be really frustrating because I want all of the pieces of the puzzle and it's rare that I get them. But we know at least those two kittens were sired by M20. We seem to lose the territorial male every year in this study to hunting activity. Last year we had this really distinctive cat come onto the ranch, M44. He's short, he's squat, and his ears look like they were damaged from frostbite, so he was very distinctive and he stands out. And then later in the spring, he shows up again at a fox den. And there were foxes at the den at the time. And so we see these kits playing outside just before he comes through. And then we actually see the mother fox sitting at the den with the lion in view in the background and she's barking a warning at it.
- [Maggie] Mountain lions can be a real danger to foxes and especially young foxes. But M44 passed by and the next day, the foxes were back about their business. Over the course of a season, it's fun to see how the foxes react to the various animals that move through the woods around them. Lions, bears, coyotes, and wolves are all potentially dangerous. And you can see the active interest the mother takes when she smells the other predators that have passed by. It's dangerous for her to leave the pups alone while she hunts, but there's no other way for her to provide the food that they need and that she needs. She's protective of her pups, and you can see her caution when she comes back to the den, surveying the area for danger and sniffing around before causing her pups to scramble into the open as she arrives to feed them. Two of the pups were killed and another two were not seen again. The remaining pup only showed eye shine at night in one eye and seems to have lost or damaged the other one. The lion appears to have been a transient cat that was just passing through. It covered up the pups like it was caching a food source and returned to pluck fur and feed that evening and the next day. But then the mother moved the pup's body and the cat moved on. The mother and remaining pup moved. But the mother came back three more times. Each time she went and looked into the main den entrance. Maybe someday we'll have a better idea of what animals think and feel. The following year, about a mile away, we were filming a bobcat. It had found a dead deer and had been trying to navigate this surly moose along with larger predators to try to get in and scavenge this carcass. And one night, a one-eyed fox showed up on the scene. It's impossible to say, but I like to think that at least one of those fox pups is still running around these mountains doing fox things.
- In the fall of 2019, we found a kill where a lion had brought down a spike elk in a wallow. And this presented us with a really unique situation because these mountain lions were not able to get this elk out of the wallow, they tried, but they could not do it. So they're forced to feed in the open. And we had this incredible filming opportunity. We're also able to collect DNA off of that site and determine which individuals were there. And what we found was... Sula. And three kittens, her three kittens. And we have well documented her and her family group feeding on this elk. So what we also see is an unrelated male comes in and shares this kill with Sula and her family. For the first time, we have proof, video evidence, of resource sharing with non-related individuals. This whole kill scenario was not ideal for these cats. They have an elk in a big pool of mud water and they don't want to get their feet wet. And so you'd have one individual on the elk feeding, others sleeping nearby, and then there'd be some sort of a cue that feeding was done and then other individuals would would kind of race in there to try to get their turn at the kill. And this all worked out really well until they were able to drag the kill out of the wallow and consume it a little bit more quickly. And as the food resource disappeared, tensions increased and we begin to see tolerance diminish between the related and unrelated individual. Never do we see anyone actually follow through on violence. There's a lot of bluffing, there's a lot of noise, but they work it out and they still share that kill. The last night on the kill is complete with a lot of tension as the resource becomes increasingly scarce and everybody wants to get the last little bit of scrap. The next morning we see the family group come in, they're a tight unit, and we have that unrelated individual just removed a little bit. Everybody's tense and competitive for scraps. And then we see the family group leave. And they go together and a period of time passes and then that lone male follows them down the exact same track. The conventional wisdom is that cats are very solitary and they won't share their food resources and they're incredibly territorial. And we see this definitely, a competition for food resources. Even as kittens, they'll fight ferociously to establish dominance and establish who gets to feed. And family members can fight amongst themselves at a kill. We see a lot of noise, a lot of bluffing, a lot of aggression, a lot of attempts at creating dominance at a kill site. But ultimately, what we also see is a reciprocal relationship where if I'm successful and you're having no luck, I may share with you. And then that is returned. And so these relationships form and it increases the potential survival for everyone. Mountain lions are obligate carnivores. They have to eat meat. So if they don't make a kill, they can't just go get something else. They have to either make a kill, share a kill, or scavenge. It's becoming increasingly clear that mountain lions have a more robust social structure than we would typically want to give them credit for. We found a spot where a drainage constricts and seems to really funnel animals through into this bottleneck. It is a prime travel corridor. We found the remains of six or seven elk killed there over the seasons. And this year a cat managed to kill a cow and a calf, presumably related, but hard to say for sure. It's likely that the cat killed one and then when the other came back looking, the cat killed it too. When we found found it, the calf was partially consumed but the cow was cached whole. The mountain lion at this kill was F27, one of Willow's giant litter of six from a couple of years before. We had cameras up on these two kills for many weeks. And one day another adult cat showed up. It fed for an afternoon, and that night, F17 returned and they fed in peace together. They shared the kill through the night and in the morning the other cat was gone. Genetic sampling revealed that cat to be Sula. So both cats are the offspring of Willow from litters a few years apart by different males. We had no prior indication of them having ever encountered each other before. It's just another example of how complex the social life of mountain lions really is. It seems clear that with overlapping territories, our residents are all well aware of each other. Last winter, we put cameras up at all of Willow's known den sites and she never showed up. Some other cats stopped by and they investigated here and there, but we just never saw Willow. She was noticeably absent from her usual territory. I spent a lot of time in there and I didn't see her tracks. And we haven't sampled her now in over a year. So there's a very real chance that she's gone. And yeah, there's something sad about thinking that that story has ended. But all things change. There are a lot of things out there that can kill a mountain lion. She could get injured during a hunt and not be able to feed herself and starve. She could be killed by hunters, as often happens. And as mountain lions get older, they experience some pretty significant tooth wear. After about age eight, the tools they rely on to hunt and to feed themselves are going to be significantly smaller and significantly less effective. So this cat ultimately will not be able to feed herself as well. It's easy to get sucked into rooting for the predator or the prey. And if we watch a mountain lion take down some beautiful deer, we feel really conflicted. But I don't think it's that simple, it's not black or white out here, there are no heroes or villains. The predator doesn't have it any easier than the prey. Their life depends on that interaction, just the same.
- You can't untangle it all. All you can do is bear witness and try to learn something about the world. 'Cause ultimately these are the same realities that are underpinning our lives as well.
- Willow may be gone, but in a very real way, her offspring carry her story forward out here. Sula, the teens, that giant litter that she had, all of those cats are still out here on this landscape. They're hunting the same drainages, they're using the same dens, they're using the skills that she taught them to survive. So I like to think of it that her story carries on.
- [Tyler] Tracking Notes, December 10th, 2021. First day of the season. Got a couple inches of fresh snow last night and caught a track right away this morning. Followed it into the back of Davis, but lost daylight.