Winston Vickers might have one of the most suspenseful screen feeds in the state: His team has installed dozens of strategically placed cameras in the Orange County backcountry to track where mountain lions roam. As we speak, Vickers is waiting for a mountain lion to approach the deer carcass that one of his team’s biologists laid out in the Santa Ana Mountains. They are hoping to lure a cougar with a free meal, so Vickers can collar it with a GPS tracker.
The director of the California Mountain Lion Project at UC Davis’ Wildlife Health Center, Vickers, 68, is one of the most experienced cougar experts in the U.S. He raves about his close encounters with the majestic predators.
“When you handle them, oh my gosh, look at their claws and those teeth! They weigh about the same as me,” the tall and trim, gray-haired researcher says with playful envy in his voice, “but holy smokes, unlike me, they’re all muscle!”
The UC Davis project, which has worked with mountain lions in Southern California for more than two decades, uses cameras and tracking collars to look at questions of habitat, health and human interaction, as the border between wilderness and development grows increasingly porous.
Northern California has a similar organization, the Santa Cruz Puma Project, which was founded by wildlife biologist Chris Wilmers in 2008. The partnership between UC Santa Cruz and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife focuses on Bay Area mountain lions, using collars and cameras to track them, and projects such as the wildlife underpass completed in January that provides safe passage beneath Highway 17 at the Laurel Curve.
The underpass, a collaboration with the Land Trust of Santa Cruz, benefits a variety of wildlife, not just mountain lions, Wilmers says. Within hours of its cameras going live, there was already evidence of squirrels, deer, wood rats and gray foxes using the underpass. Researchers are just now starting to get focused data on how well it works.
Vickers’ and Wilmers’ research focus has a common impetus: In both the Santa Monica and Santa Cruz mountains, California mountain lions’ survival is threatened by inbreeding, human interference and car crashes.
In Southern California, “cars and roads, in a nutshell, are the main cause of their deaths,” says Vickers,
In the Bay Area, Wilmers says, traffic accidents are second only to humans seeking revenge against mountain lions that kill livestock and pets.
Rodenticides can be harmful to mountain lions, although it rarely is their primary cause of death, he adds. Mountain lions are an apex predator, and they feed on larger animals. But rodenticides can lead to a weakened immune system in mountain lions, making them more susceptible to illness and possible death.
“Every (dead) mountain lion we find has some amount of rodenticide in its system,” Wilmers says. “It is very widespread.”
Urban development and the vast networks of highways and interstates create another sort of threat for the animals, one that most people don’t even think about. The barriers prevent free movement by the mountain lions. The result is populations that suffer from inbreeding. Vickers has seen it firsthand: mountain lions reaching a freeway, sitting for hours as cars and trucks speed past and then turning around, because they don’t dare cross.
The lack of genetic diversity in an inbred population, if not addressed, could doom the estimated 5,000 mountain lions that reside in the state. Already, scientists are seeing newborns with deformities such as kinked tails. Vickers was instrumental in a recent study which discovered that 93 percent of the male mountain lions have abnormal sperm.
“There’s a race to the bottom,” he says.
Along with other experts, he estimates that mountain lions will be locally extinct by 2050, if the state does not take drastic measures to help them survive.
Vickers grew up on a cattle farm in the Ozarks, the son of a country vet. “We treated every creature, small and large, from cats to cows,” he says.
He describes himself as an outdoorsy kid, “always fishing and hunting and canoeing.” He vowed not to follow in his father’s footsteps but after a few semesters of studying engineering, the call of the wild was too strong, and he switched to veterinary medicine after all.
“What my dad really gave me was appreciation for animals and caring about their welfare,” he says.
Vickers became a vegetarian when he started to work as a veterinarian, “because I couldn’t really see the value of working so hard to save the life of one cow only to then kill it for a steak.”
He worked as a regular vet in Arkansas and California for nearly two decades, while also accepting every chance to treat wildlife. His fascination with big cats led him all the way to Nepal to study snow leopards. A second degree in epidemiology at UC Davis inspired him to join the Mountain Lion Project there in 2002. At the time, the vets there had started out researching endangered bighorn sheep in Anza Borrego State Park and considered mountain lions a threat to them.
“We were soon shocked to find that the mountain lions had an unusually high mortality rate,” Vickers remembers. So the researchers started tracking mountain lions, accumulating 20 years of detailed knowledge about the reclusive animals. The data on the big cats’ important habitats and corridors has become key for conservation efforts.
Vickers is among those calling for wildlife crossings over major freeways so local mountain lions can mix and mate with peers from neighboring habitats. In the Santa Monica Mountains, Caltrans recently broke ground on the world’s biggest wildlife overpass, dubbed the Liberty Crossing over busy 101. The new bridge, which is expected to open in 2025, will cost $88 million, a sum that sounds outrageous until one considers the alternative: In the last three years, wildlife crashes in California have cost more than $1 billion.
The crossings help wildlife of all sorts. In Utah, wildlife crossings have reduced fatal deer collisions by 98.5 percent, and Colorado has seen a drop of nearly 90 percent. Apex predators such as pumas also act as “ecological brokers,” a recent study found, and play “an outsize role” for the health and biodiversity of their territories.
Another overpass is being planned for Highway 101 near the border of Santa Clara and San Benito counties. The nonprofit Land Trust of San Cruz County purchased a 2,600-acre slice of land near San Juan Bautista in December, spending $17 million. Now the trust is working with Caltrans to build a 120- to 160-foot wide wildlife crossing, which will provide mountain lions, deer, bobcats, badgers, foxes and other animals safe passage over the highway.
Vickers hopes he can convince the state and conservationists to add several smaller crossings in Orange County as well and improve the small existing freeway underpass near Temecula Creek. He soon will start meeting with experts and engineers from Caltrans, the Nature Conservancy, National Park Service and other organizations to determine the best designs and locations for crossings “to help as many species as possible. Mountain lions have become the poster child, but the barriers affect many other animals, including birds that don’t like to fly over freeways.”
Providing safer routes for animals to navigate their territories is important, but it’s not the only thing that can be done to ensure the survival of mountain lions.
“No. 1 is stop the sprawl of development,” Wilmers says. “Build in existing cities. Secondarily, a lot of mountain lions die when they kill someone’s goats. People often have their goats in pens at night, which helps them keep track of the goats but doesn’t provide any protection against predators. If they can, they should have their goats in a fully enclosed structure with a roof.”
Acknowledging that “it’s hard to get people to change their behavior and spend money to build a barn or a secure cage for their animals at night,” Vickers focuses on young people. “Educating the young when they’re at the formative stage on how to protect animals, hopefully, that’s a long-term solution.”
When asked what fascinates him the most about the charismatic cougars, he raves about their resilience.
“Despite dramatic persecution, they have been the most successful of the big carnivores to persist,” he says, with awe in his raspy voice. “You just have to admire their ability to continue to exist against all odds.”
