PREDATORS — Wildlife Services agents dispatched a 175-pound mountain lion near Helena, Mont., recently after the cat killed at least six llamas and left them uneaten.  Sport-killing behavior is rare for cougars, and officials don't have an easy answer.

Read the Helena Independent Record report. 

HUNTING — Californians love and protect their mountain lions, even though the state is among the few where cougars have attacked and killed people in the past 20 years.

But the president of the California Fish and Game Commission is getting pressure to resign after he booked a perfectly legal mountain lion hunt in Idaho and filled his tag.

The incident is highlighted in this Huckleberries post by Dave Oliveria.

HUNTING – Washington’s most popular deer-hunting season opens Saturday morning in Eastern Washington, and the Department of Fish and Wildlife has made a point to remind hunters that cougars also are fair game anywhere in the state.

Under this year’s rules, deer hunters with a valid cougar license and transport tag can take a cougar during the modern-firearms deer season in all 39 counties – including Okanogan, Chelan, Ferry, Stevens, Pend Oreille and Klickitat.

That’s a change from recent years, when general cougar-hunting seasons in those six counties were delayed to accommodate a pilot program that allowed hunters with special permits to track cougars using dogs.

“In those six counties, we’re back to relying on general hunts to manage cougar populations,” said Dave Ware, WDFW game manager. “We can make that work, but it does present some different management challenges.”

Ware said permit hunters using dogs generally took male cougars, while those who encounter cougar during general hunts – without dogs – are less likely to discriminate between the sexes. Under state law, it is illegal to kill spotted cougar kittens or adult cougars tending kittens.

Using dogs to hunt cougars was banned by a citizens’ initiative in 2006, but later allowed by the Legislature under a pilot program in counties reporting increasing conflicts with the big cats.

More than 100,000 hunters are expected to take to the field this month for the modern-firearms deer season that runs through various dates around the state. Cougar hunting is open through the end of the year, although few are taken outside of the major deer and elk hunting seasons, Ware said.

HUNTING — Years ago, before Jim Ebel had retired as manager of the Colville Fish Hatchery, I wrote a story about his unnerving encounter with a cougar.

He was putting up a tree stand before the archery deer season when a cougar came in below the tree and waited for an easy meal to come down.  Ebel was unarmed.

Eventually the cat left the immediate area, so Ebel crawled down and began hiking a mile to his pickup, but the cougar immediately showed up again and stalked him from beihind and from the side, slipping in and out of sight at close range.

That experience — something most hunters will never experience in their lifetimes — was enough to convince Ebel to carry a weapon in the woods.

But last year's hunting season seemed to move Ebel's status from hunter to “bait.”

Read on for the rest of the story:

WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT — The Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission today voted to increase cougar hunting opportunities in six counties.

Meeting via telephone, the commission amended cougar hunting regulations for a pilot project that authorizes cougar hunting with the aid of dogs. The project had expired and was not extended this year by the Legislature.

The commission increased cougar hunting opportunities without the aid of dogs in Klickitat, Chelan, Okanogan, Ferry, Stevens and Pend Oreille counties to continue to meet management objectives in those areas.

In addition, the commission modified the criteria for determining when cougars are removed to address public concerns about pet and livestock depredation and personal safety. The change allows for cougar removals when complaints confirmed by WDFW staff in a given game management unit exceed the five-year average.

WDFW game managers recommended the amendments to cougar hunting regulations as an interim measure until the 2012-14 hunting season package is developed.

Public discussion of the 2012-14 hunting seasons is scheduled to begin this month, including a Spokane meeting on Wednesday. 

Click here for more information about future commission meetings.

WILDLIFE WATCHING — An Arizona couple recently witnessed a wildlife spectacle outside their home hear Gold Canyon as a mountain lion launched an attack on a bobcat.

In a desperate escape along the foothills of the Superstition Mountains, the bobcat sprinted up a very tall and very stickery saguaro cactus. The mountain lion called off the chase at that point.

Curt Fonger tells the story and shares photos with an Arizona TV station.

The photographer seized the opportunity to capture photos of the bobcat on its perch. One of the photos from a distance gives a good perspective on the height of the cactus.   The bobcat just hunkered on the saguaro for hours until the coast was clear, and then departed, seemingly impervious to the sharp cactus spines.

Fonger said the only way he'll top that wildlife photography experience is if the mountain lion comes by and gives him a pose.

WILDLIFE ENCOUNTERS — Two men kept their cool and successfully retreated from an aggressive cougar near Hoquiam, Wash., on Sunday.

According to a KING 5 report, Puget Sound salmon manager Steve Thiesfeld said the two men were completing a habitat survey on the Little Hoquiam River when they spotted the cougar following them, with ears back and hissing.
  
The two faced the animal, waved their arms and inched toward the road for about 20 minutes.
  
Theisfeld told reporters the cat came within striking distance several times before they made it to the roadway, where they climbed into their truck.

PREDATORS — Mitch Friedman of Conservation Northwest has concerns about hunting cougars.

Nevertheless, he was disappointed by the Washington Legislature's failure to pass a bill to extend a pilot program that has allowed the use of hounds for limited cougar hunting in Northeastern Washington.  The bill died on the vine last week despite bipartisan support.

On Friday, Friedman wrote his well thought-out reaction to the situation and where the state and people in northeastern Washington should go from here.

“Cougar hunting can’t not be controversial,” Friedman said. “On one hand, they are gorgeous cats that, as apex predators, play critical roles in the balance of ecosystems, assuring that conservationists and animal lovers have strong feelings about them. On the other hand, this silent and powerful stalker gives people who live or raise livestock around them strong feelings of a different sort.”

WILDLIFE — RIchland law enforcement officials on Friday killed a cougar after workers found the six-foot-long cat in the basement of a south Richland home that’s under construction.

Richland police said they were called at 9:15 a.m, according to the Tri-City Herald. An officer from the Washington Fish and Wildlife Department also responded.

The home is in the framing stage and when workers arrived they discovered the cougar hiding in a basement nook, police said.

Because of the location, the number of people in the area, and other safety concerns, officers determined there was no other option but to shoot the cougar.

A similar incident occured earlier in the week in Wenatchee.

WILDLIFE — Dogs are breathing easier in Wenatchee this afternoon.

After police evacuated homeowners from a Wenatchee neighborhood this morning, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife officials killed a cougar found underneath a house deck.

Rich Beausoleil, the ageny's cougar specialist, said the location of the cougar and the number of people in the area, including children waiting for a school bus, made it too risky to attempt to tranquilize the animal and remove it alive.

Beausoleil estimated the 30-pound female cougar to be six and a half months old and in poor shape, at half normal weight. He speculated that it may have been orphaned.

Click here for more info on cougars in Washington.  Read on for details on this case:

WILDLIFE — Mountain lions don't eat hay, but this veggie bar spready out near Chewelah this winter likely attracted plenty of deer. 

Cougars like an all-you-can eat buffet deal as much as anyone.

This photo is amon several snapped of cougars in February and March by a motion-activated camera about 45 miles north of Spokane.

PREDATORS — An Angus bull that died last month from injuries after fighting with another bull near Missoula attracted the who's who of non-hibernating predators into the unblinking lens of a motion-activated camera.

A lone gray wolf spent just 18 minutes feeding on the carcass above Missoula's South Hills, apparently cowed by the fact that a mountain lion had already claimed the prize — and often slept by its feast.

Click here or read on for the Missoulian's detailed story.

PREDATORS — The Washington Senate approved another extension of a long-standing pilot program that allows the hunting of cougars with dogs in northeastern Washington and Klickitat County.

The Senate approved the measure Tuesday 37-1. It would expand for another five years a pilot program created in 2004 that allowed tightly regulated hunts to take place in some counties in eastern Washington.

The pilot program has been extended twice.

In 1996, Washington voters approved an initiative that banned such hunts.

The measure heads to the House for further consideration.

WILDLIFE — A trail cam photo that shows eight cougars in one frame (click “continue reading” below) has been going viral on Northwest websites and e-mail lists since a hunter shared it with friends on Christmas day.

As usual, not all the the information in the anonymous e-mails is correct.

But Wednesday, after tracking down the man who made the photos, and collaborating his info with wildlife biologists who looked into matter, the real story is even better than the made up stuff.

All the details are in my Thursday outdoors column.  But first a few facts to dispell the misinformation in the circulating e-mails, of which I've received at least eight:

— The images are from a motion-activated camera a hunter placed on a private ranch near Moses Coulee northwest of Quincy.

—The cougars were not feeding on a carcass.  No carcass was in the area.

“Cougars are notoriously territorial,” said Jon Gallie, the Washington Fish and Wildlife Department's biologist in Wenatchee. “Seeing eight in one spot is a wildlife jackpot.”

OLYMPIA — Fifteen years after Washington voters banned using dogs to hunt cougars, lawmakers want to set permanent hunting seasons allowing licensed hunters to use hounds to track the cats, according to an Associated Press story.

The proposed bill, sponsored by Rep. Brian Blake, D-Aberdeen, is the latest step in a seven-year process of addressing the 1996 ban through a pilot program aimed at testing cougar hunting seasons with dogs to stem the cougar conflict complaints that spiked after the ban.

The original three-year program has been extended twice so far.

Representatives from the Fish and Wildlife Commission say the pilot program has resulted in a 75 percent decline in confirmed complaints about cougars killing pets or livestock, or causing other problems.

Still, opponents of the bill say the use of hounds is cruel and inhumane, and is not being limited to public safety concerns.

The major opponent to the bill is the out-of-state-based Humane Society of the United States, which was a major funding source for the initiative campaign to ban hound hunting for cougars and bears.

HSUS is not affiliated with the “Humane Society” pet shelters that do the hard work of taking care of stray pets on a local level. Instead, HSUS is a multimillion-dollar conglomerate that mainly creates issues to feed its fundraising mission. 

I elaborated on this with details from the HSUS tax returns in this recent column, one of several on the subject.

Meantime, read on for more of the AP story from Olympia.

LEGISLATING WILDLIFE – Washington lawmakers heard a mixed bag of testimony at a hearing today on continuing the pilot program that allows the use of hounds for hunting cougars.

HB 1124 seeks to extend the program in a portion of Klickitat County as well as in a swath across northeastern Washington from Chelan County east through Pend Oreille County.

The use of hounds for hunting cougars and bears was prohibited by passage of Initiative 65 in 1996.  But the sharp increase of cougar encounters with humans and domestic animals prompted the state to authorize a strictly regulated program to hunt troublesome cougars using hounds – the only effective way to target specific animals.

Groups such as the Humane Society of the United States say extending the pilot program would be an affront to the will of the people who approved Initiative 65. County commissioners, livestock owners and others testified that regulated hound hunting is needed control cougar numbers.

Wildlife officials confirmed that complaints about cougars have declined significantly under the program.

WILDLIFE — A cougar was seen around 9 p.m. Wednesday night chasing a deer across Government Way near Mukogawa-Fort Wright Institute in Spokane.

The large, healthy looking cougar was in hot pursuit of the deer when a vehicle interrupted the chase. The cougar leaped about 20 feet in the air off the side of the road.

Be aware that the week’s snowfall will concentrate deer, and deer are a cougar’s primary prey.

The Spokane River area is a beautiful escape in the winter, but this sighting reminds us that solo hikes are risky especially for people of small stature that are more likely to be targeted by cougars. Stay in groups and keep the kids close by.