Ambassador Mountain Lions

"Along the way the lion had quietly disarmed those who would grab for their guns. The presumed serial killer at large had passed through uncounted barnyards, pastures, and corrals, past all their offerings of easy meat, without incident. He had toured towns and cities swarming with two-legged enticements...And he had walked on. Not one time in his two-year tour of America was the lion known to have threatened a human soul, though many were the times he would have been executed as a public enemy if so much as seen." Will Stolzenburg, Heart of a Lion

Five year's ago this evening, the cross-country odyssey of the young tom we've been calling Walker ended in central Connecticut. With L.A.'s P-22, who figures prominently in Heart of a Lion's epilogue, Will Stolzenburg's book tour features these two most famous cougars as ambassadors of coexistence, not just for Puma concolor, but for all carnivores now sharing our neighborhoods. 

Hosts of Will's tour in New York City suburbs, where black bears, bobcats, coyotes and fishers reside foot to paw with metro commuters, and graduate students at Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Science, were inspired by Heart of a Lion's umbrella theme of suburban carnivore coexistence. Two years ago, the Cougar Rewilding Foundation wrote about California's neighborly cougars, reported from San Francisco Bay Area state and municipal parks, interviewing elders during their morning constitutionals and parents walking toddlers in posted mountain lion habitat. With the UC Santa Cruz Puma Project, we visited a den within several hundred yards of a Silicon Valley neighborhood - a neighborhood telemetry data showed was part of that female's home range. Now there's a new book on carnivore coexistence. 

When Mountain Lions Are Neighbors, by the National Wildlife Federation's Beth Pratt, tells the story of California wildlife coexistence: of P-22 and the Santa Monica wildlife crossing venture, of Facebook making room for a gray fox den on its Silicon Valley campus, of OR-7's Walker-like lone wolf journey for a mate and the Golden State's welcoming embrace of Canis lupus recovery. As noted in our April report, the longer our toothy neighbors live next to us, the smarter they get: they adapt to avoid us. Sure, there will always be the rare trouble-makers - typically the adolescents of any species - that garner headlines and fire the inferno for extermination campaigns masquarading as carnivore management. Let's keep it in perspective. Chance of a mountain lion attack: 1 in 300 million. Chance of colliding with a deer: 1 in 170. Long working on keeping human/critter relations in perspective, The Humane Society has just launched a new initiative on living with wild urban neighbors.

Here's to the new paradigm. Leave 'em alone. Let carnivores police their own. 

And if you happen to be in a position to host authors Stolzenburg and Pratt with their ambassador message of ambassador mountain lions Walker and P-22, please do. Please, support these writers and their vital books.

If, indeed, we are at the beginning of a shift in our nation's perspective on carnivore coexistence, let's remember the intrepid cat who helped show us the way. Tonight, light a candle for Walker.



Christopher Spatz

Graphics courtesy of the Mountain Lion Foundation's Amy Rodrigues

Thank you to Adirondack artist Rod McGiver for the use of his Shadows image on our masthead.