Mountain lion suspected in June deaths of 2 sheep on Penngrove ranch

A Penngrove woman who lost two sheep in eight days is seeking a change in the policy preventing her from stopping the big cat that preyed on her ewes.

Sarah Keiser owns Wild Oat Hollow, a 2-acre farm a third of a mile north of downtown Penngrove. A mother of two, she raises goats, chickens and sheep specially bred for their high-quality fleece.

Two of her sheep were killed on successive Sundays in June. Under cover of darkness, a predator thought to be a mountain lion leaped over a 5-foot fence tipped with strands of barbed wire. In both attacks, the puma killed a 100-pound ewe.

“I’m predator friendly,” said Keiser. “I think mountain lions are key.”

A committed environmentalist, she understands that apex predators play a critical role in keeping a healthy ecosystem in balance.

In her view, however, that balance has been skewed by rules making it overly difficult to “manage” big cats who prey on livestock — in this case, a mountain lion that’s been spotted repeatedly in a fairly populous area.

After her second sheep was killed, Keiser discussed her options with a state Department of Fish and Wildlife officer. She was surprised by what she learned. The official informed her that, under a new California policy, landowners that have had pets or livestock attacked must first try nonlethal means to deter mountain lions. After a third attack, the landowner can get a lethal depredation permit.

Adopted in 2017, California’s three-strikes mountain lion depredation policy applied to only parts of the state. As of February, it’s now apparently being implemented statewide, although no update has been published on the department’s website. Calls, texts and emails to state fish and wildlife officials on Thursday and Friday were not returned.

A policy designed for ranchers running hundreds of animals on vast acreages makes far less sense, Keiser said, when applied to a rural residential neighborhood.

“These are mostly 2-acre lots,” she said of her Penngrove surroundings. “If I lose a sheep, and then my neighbor loses a calf, and two houses down, they lose two goats, we can’t do anything about it.”

“We now have a policy that makes us unable to protect our livestock,” Keiser said.

Her concerns extend beyond her own losses. The mountain lion that took her sheep, she said, has been frequenting the area, “moving right through people’s backyards.” Residents are waking up to find mountain lion “scat,” she said, “at their front door.”

Around 8 a.m. on June 26, a neighbor reported seeing a big cat near the pasture where Keiser kept her sheep. “It stared at her for a minute or two, then walked away,” Keiser said.

Two days later, neighbors heard Keiser’s protection dog, a large Spanish Mastiff, barking at 5:30 in the morning. A second sheep had been killed in the same pasture.

The Fish and Wildlife official who responded to the call agreed the predator was a mountain lion, Keiser said. That official did not reply to phone calls or texts on Thursday or Friday.

Keiser described the animal as “very confident” and “not particularly deterred by humans.” She has alerted neighbors to be vigilant, and keep children indoors until 9 a.m.

The area where Keiser’s sheep were killed “is not at all core mountain lion habitat,” said Quinton Martins, a big cat expert and founder of Glen Ellen-based Living With Lions, a project he leads for nonprofit Audubon Canyon Ranch. That program traps and collars mountain lions, then tracks their movements. Martins aims to educate landowners, to show them it’s better to coexist with apex predators than it is to shoot them.

If the Penngrove predator is a mountain lion, Martins said, it’s likely a “dispersal” animal, a younger cat that recently left its mother and lacks an established territory — like the puma that wandered into the city, then curled up in a planter outside Macy’s department store at Santa Rosa Plaza in April 2019.

Martins said it’s the landowner’s responsibility to ensure the well-being of their animals — “just like keeping a pet.” A simple livestock enclosure “that is also closed on top” is the most effective way to keep animals safe from big cats.

Such upgrades can be prohibitively expensive and impractical for many livestock owners, said Keiser, who notes she’s been transformed into an activist by the loss of her sheep. To spotlight the issue, she hopes to moderate a Zoom panel discussion. It would include Martins but others with differing viewpoints, such as local rancher Ron Crane, and Tawny Tesconi, executive director of the Sonoma County Farm Bureau.

In conversations with the ranchers for whom she advocates, Tesconi said, she’s hearing a similar refrain.

“These are third-, fourth-, fifth-generation farmers. They grew up here,” Tesconi said. “They know rural Sonoma County. And this is different from what their fathers and grandfathers experienced, in terms of mountain lions.”

The ranchers are seeing “a lot less deer, and fewer of the smaller animals” lions prey on, she said. As a result, many believe, “mountain lions are becoming much more aggressive.”

Crane owns a ranch on Petaluma Hill Road, just east of Sonoma State University. His family’s been on that piece of land since 1852. Overcrowding and overpopulation in the county, he thinks, has cut into the natural food sources of mountain lions. As a result, the big cats are “turning more and more to livestock, house cats, anything that’s an easy meal.”

As a result, he said, mountain lions are becoming “desensitized” to humans.

“I feel like we’re headed in a bad direction,” Crane said.

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.