Lions & Tigers & Bears in OHmaha

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Mountain lions move east
Big cats stir worries on prairie

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa - "Iowa is the state with the highest mountain lion hysteria."

So explained Ron Andrews, furbearer resource specialist for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

His standing-room-only audience was mostly farmers and their wives, weatherworn men with feed caps, sturdy women with sensible shoes. They looked more suspicious than hysterical. They had crowded into a community center here in the heart of hog and corn country to find out the skulking particulars on the world's fourth-largest cat.

State records show that mountain lions disappeared from Iowa in 1867. But with increasing and unnerving regularity, the ambush predator -- which will kill and eat house pets, livestock and humans but much prefers deer -- is back on the prowl, in Iowa and across the Midwest. It is turning up on farms, in suburbs and even in occasional appearances downtown.

In the past 12 months, 19 have been shot, killed with arrows, hit by trains, run over by cars, captured, photographed or detected through DNA evidence of their midwestern travels, according to the Cougar Network, a group that monitors eastward movement of the cats.

The presence of the mountain lions, many of which have been found with freshly killed deer in their stomachs, is a startling signal that modern suburban and exurban America -- without intending to do so -- has transformed itself into superb wildlife habitat. With deer nearly everywhere, the big cats, it seems, are finding haute cuisine in the land of big-box stores.

Last year, one ran through downtown Omaha. Last month, one was shot in the suburbs of Sioux City. This month, a radio-collared mountain lion was spotted in the outskirts of Grand Forks, N.D. One was photographed in mid-October on a farm near Marshalltown in central Iowa, a confirmed sighting that deeply disturbed people at the recent meeting here.

State game officials say mountain lions have triggered widespread paranoia, with many Iowans worrying about the beasts in an excessive and unhealthy way. False sightings are rampant. Scouting groups have canceled field trips. At mountain lion briefings conducted by game officials across Iowa, farmers have announced that they no longer go out at night to tend livestock -- without a gun.

"I hear something screeching in the night in the woods outside my porch," Jan Chantland, a farm wife, complained at the meeting here. "It just sends chills up my spine."

Black helicopters
There are also rumors across the Midwest that state game agencies -- sometimes using black helicopters -- are secretly planting mountain lions in farm country. Before the Marshalltown meeting began, these rumors danced around the community center. Andrews, the state's leading expert on mountain lions, began his slide presentation by attacking the rumors head-on.

"We did not, we have not and we will not release mountain lions in Iowa," said Andrews, who handed out a document that repeated the denial in boldface type.

The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, in state documents, also denies involvement in mountain lion reintroductions. The rumors and official denials are rife, too, in Missouri, where wildlife officials say that hunters fear the state is smuggling in mountain lions to shorten the deer-hunting season.

Farmers and ranchers, as an enduring rule, hate mountain lions, which are also called cougars, pumas, panthers and catamounts. By any name, until recent decades, they were treated as no-good varmints and killed for bounty, for fun, for Manifest Destiny. The cats disappeared from the Midwest by about 1900.

Their unwelcome comeback in the Corn Belt, which began about a decade ago and has steadily gathered momentum, is being driven by two historically significant biological phenomena, wildlife ecologists say.

First, there are probably more mountain lions in the continental United States now than before European settlement (more than 31,000, by one recent estimate). The resurgence began in the 1960s, when several western states, where mountain lion populations had been reduced but never wiped out, changed the legal status of the cats from varmint to big game, with limited or no hunting.

The number of mountain lions, as a result, began to exceed the carrying capacity of the land, especially in the Front Range of the Rockies in Colorado and in the Black Hills of western South Dakota. Young males were forced -- on penalty of death, imposed by highly territorial older males -- to go forth and establish new territory, wildlife biologists say.

Second, there are more white-tailed deer in the United States than before European settlement (estimates now range from 20 million to 33 million), with huge and increasingly unhunted populations in rural and suburban areas east of the Mississippi. The regrowth of eastern forests offers cover for deer, and succulent suburban shrubbery offers year-round food.

Young male mountain lions -- called "dispersers" by scientists -- seem to be following their appetites east. Moving along wooded river corridors, they can travel 50 to 100 miles in a night. They swim well; several appear to have crossed the Mississippi. One radio-collared male from western South Dakota was hit by a train this summer near the Kansas-Oklahoma border, having traveled an estimated 950 miles.

The inexorable result of this dispersal, according to Paul Beier, a professor of wildlife ecology at Northern Arizona University and an authority on mountain lion interaction with human beings, will be increasing conflict between cats and people.

'Sooner or later'
Beier said these conflicts, commonplace in Rocky Mountain cities such as Boulder, Colo., and Bozeman, Mont., are beginning to occur in the Midwest and can be expected soon in the deer-infested suburbs of the East Coast.

"Dispersers are going to keep moving east," Beier said. "Most will die quickly, killed on highways, but there are going to be a couple who will hang on long enough to kill somebody in a back yard. I suspect it will be on the order of one human every 10 years. We do know it will be more than a non-zero risk. When people and cats share the same land space, somebody is going to be bit sooner or later."

It is exceedingly rare for a mountain lion to kill a human being. In the past 110 years, the cats have attacked 66 people and killed 18 in the United States and Canada, according to figures compiled by Iowa's Department of Natural Resources. Fatal attacks are far less common than fatal bee stings or lightning strikes.

But the annual rate of mountain lion attacks has increased sharply since 1970, from one to four attacks a year, and more than half of the known fatalities have occurred since 1990. As David Baron documented in "The Beast in the Garden," his book about mountain lions in Boulder, the trend is clear: As wildlife invade suburbs, mountain lions are increasingly accustomed to living around and stalking people.

"Lion attacks and close encounters have become a recurrent fact of life" in parts of Colorado, Baron writes.

Beier, the wildlife ecologist, says many westerners are aware that the cats pose some personal risk but they are willing to accept it.

"We are enormously more tolerant toward predators in this country than we used to be," Beier said. "It is part of a major sea change in the way Americans value wildlife."

That tolerance, however, does not seem to be in generous supply in Iowa and much of the Midwest. The comeback of the cats in Iowa has not prompted the state legislature to protect mountain lions or to categorize them as game animals.

They remain varmints, unprotected by any law, and Iowans can shoot them at their leisure.

At the mountain lion briefing here, Andrews instructed Iowans on what to do if they have a close encounter with a cat and do not have a gun. Raise your hands and try to "appear large and threatening," he said, adding that if the animal attacks, it is often useful to "fight back vigorously."

The cats like to kill by biting prey in the back of the neck, so it is not useful to run.

After explaining this to the silent, wide-eyed farmers, Andrews said: "Don't be held hostage. Continue to enjoy the outdoors."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company