Mountain lions come with the territory in Sonoma Valley

They were busting down the barn walls at Bouverie Preserve's Gilman Hall last Thursday, filling every seat in the house and then some. They came to meet their neighbors – not the sociable two-legged kind with a common interest in hiking the 535-acre nature sanctuary, but the elusive, solitary, four-legged big cat of the Sonoma Valley: the mountain lion.

Since Audubon Canyon Ranch launched its Mountain Lion Project about a year ago, the area's popular imagination has been roused by a series of media teases: eerie nighttime photographs from trailside cameras, color images of mountain lions being fitted or “tagged” with radio collars. Then, just a few days ago, a tiny little video of three tiny little lion cubs mewing and hissing in a secret nest, somewhere between Glen Ellen and Kenwood.

April 20 was the latest in a series of public outreach meetings that the project's director, Quinton Martins, has been holding to present information, share knowledge, and quash rumors about the project and the animals he's studying. It's part of what he calls “public outreach” – which he sees as a key feature of his role as a wildlife biologist.

“What I'd like you to take home is learning something about your neighbors,” said the energetic Martins, a former African safari guide. “Marketing people don't do a good job at marketing the best product on the planet – that is, the planet!”

So Martins has embraced the role of public outreach, and his presentation was both witty and informative in equal measure, with home-made music videos to enliven the show. His goal, he said, is to connect the plentiful science about mountain lions with public knowledge, which he finds lacking.

For the first part of his talk a large photo was projected behind him of a mountain lion filling the frame while far in the background could be seen the well-known Hollywood sign – showing that even in the heart of a metropolis, mountain lions survive.

So far there are no photos of mountain lions in front of the film festival's “Sonomawood” sign, but the research of the ACR Mountain Lion Project is filling up fast with details about the population of Puma concolor in the Valley. Martins' arrival in Sonoma is what prompted Jeanne Wirka, director of stewardship and resident biologist at Bouverie Preserve, to start the mountain lion project.

“He and his wife Liz had relocated to Sonoma from South Africa, to work on a project with the Snow Leopard Conservancy,” says Wirka. “That didn't work out for a variety of reasons, but when we were setting up some camera traps on (Bouverie ecologist Jennifer Potts's) property where he was renting a house he kept showing up to help us out.”

Wirka found out about Martins' expertise in big cat research, and immediately went to the ACR Board of Directors about backing his interest in a local puma project.

“I told them this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, this is so awesome we should do this,” says Wirka. While most of ACR's research has been in the Tomales Bay coastal area where they were founded 50 years ago, now more than half the land they own is inland, at Bouverie and the 3,000-acre Montini Mayacamas Preserve.

“We're in the business now of preserving terrestrial ecosystems as much as coastal ecosystems. So it's a good fit,” says Wirka.

The first mountain lion was “collared” – trapped and sedated, tested and measured and fitted with a radio collar that emits location signals every two hours for over a year – less than a year ago in October, at Bouverie Preserve about 300 meters from the Gilman Hall visitors center. That was P1 – P for puma, one of several common names for the same species. She is about 10 years old, has had several litters of cubs including at least one, the female P2, who has also been collared.

At the presentation, Martins described common methods of capturing and collaring the cats, starting with the original means of using hounds to chase a mountain lion into a tree, where it is an easy target for a scientist's sedative dart. But Sonoma Valley has too many fences to allow for free-ranging hounds, so he started by using a metal cage trap, baited with meat from one of the animal's own kills.

More recently, he began to wonder if the bait was even necessary. Cats, all cats, are naturally inquisitive, so the team set up a cage tunnel in the woods, located along a known wildlife path, open at both ends. It was fitted with an electronic eye that would recognize by size when a mountain lion was passing through, which would trigger the gates to fall and trap the cat.

It worked: P5, the latest to be collared, was caught in just such a humane, curiosity-caught-the-cat trap.

P5 is the first male to be collared, and already in less than a month the record of his movements has shed light on the whole project.

He was collared on a private ranch off Sonoma Mountain Road, but within days he was transmitting from Dry Creek in Napa Valley, crossing Highway 12 almost at will. Within this large range are several female ranges, as theory predicts: “He's definitely the dominant male in this area,” says Wirka. “The fact that he's got multiple females living in his range is a sign that he's the head honcho around here.”

The research has also found that the mountain lion diet is primarily deer, and most of those are caught in fenced areas, on private property. Which means it must be easier to corner prey inside a fence than in the wide-open spaces of a regional or state park such as Jack London or Sugarloaf.

All of which leads to the deduction that mountain lions may be more our neighbors than we might have thought: using our own rural properties as their range, hunting inside our fences, thriving in the darkness of the night where we spend our days.

“If a habitat's there,” says Wirka, “it's almost certain a mountain lion is using it.”

And that is a good thing. It's possible mountain lions could exert what's called a “trophic cascade” in the landscape. At the Bouverie meet-your-neighbors gathering, Martins showed a short film called “How Wolves Change Rivers” that looked at the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. It demonstrated that the wolves' hunting changed the behavior of their prey, deer and elk; the ungulates started avoiding open meadows, which led to more flowers, to more birds, to more beavers, badgers, and other animal diversity.

In due course, river channels themselves narrowed between more stable banks, and meandered less. In short, introducing wolves changed not only the ecosystem but the physical geography.

Perhaps in the Sonoma Valley the results wouldn't be so dramatic. But the results of the Mountain Lion Project just in the past month have shown something that could affect the landscape in a tangible way: P5 often crosses under Highway 12 through a stream culvert near Glen Ellen.

“Caltrans is planning some road widening on Highway 12,” says Wirka, “and it's just really good timing for us to have some information to be able to say ‘Look, this is a really important wildlife crossing, we need to work with you on how to keep it that way.'”

Contact Christian at christian.kallen@sonomanews.com.