Mountain Lions, Forest Fires and 73-Year-Old Women

What’s the most interesting thing that’s happened in your house at night? Our 73-year-old neighbor in Big Sur, California was lying in bed reading at 11:30, and she had just dozed off when a mountain lion crashed THROUGH the glass of her front door, trying to get her pet cat. I’m not making this up. The cat streaked under her bed, with the lion in hot pursuit, and by the time this woman had her senses about her, there was a great tawny rump and tail sticking up beside her from under her bed.

It gets better. She thought it was a neighborhood dog. She smacked it on the rump and yelled for it to get out. The mountain lion, somewhat taken aback, leapt back across the room, perched on a box, and looked at her. At this point, the woman’s husband appeared in the bedroom door (blocking the lion’s only escape), and the lion, unnerved and disoriented now, started coursing around the room looking for a way out, knocking things over and breaking two mirrors. The couple retreated to another room, and the mountain lion immediately vanished into the night.

It was 2008, and our small Big Sur, California community had just survived the Basin Complex forest fire, and strange things happen after large forest fires. This was probably one of them. Huge areas of wilderness had been burned, and the deer, a mountain lion’s main prey, had moved elsewhere in search of food, or perished. The lion was sighted several more times, and so was a cub that was probably hers, and people’s cats were disappearing. The lion had probably lived its life in deep wilderness. In all likelyhood she was displaced, disoriented, desperate, hungry, and—to make it even worse—a mother. It can all add up to a very aggressive personailty. She was probably unfamiliar with human settlements, and this was probably her first encounter with glass (and a pretty unpleasant one, I’m guessing). We were just hoping to somehow make these first human encounters as negative as possible for her, so she’d move on. Otherwise, Department of Fish and Game hunters would have to come into our canyon and kill her.

When you choose to live on the edge of a wilderness, you take on an obligation to co-exist with the elements of nature that drew you there, and it’s a for-better-or-worse contract. You get the babbling brooks and the cute songbirds, and you also get fires, floods and the occaisonal mountain lion. In the wake of this, I have not heard any voices in the canyon demanding indignantly to be made safe, and that’s a community sentiment I’m proud of. We were keeping our pets indoors and hoping the lion moved on. But we knew that she might not. She’d already had several meals. This was working for her.

As for the woman, a long-time resident of Big Sur who works at Esalen Institute, she said she never once felt frightened or threatened, and hoped no one would have to kill the big cat. I’m jealous of her legacy. How many people can say they’ve smacked a mountain lion on the butt?

As for the kitty cat, she escaped unscathed, though she didn’t come out from under the bed for two days.

As for myself, I love nature and I love mountain lions, but I seem not to have the steel nerves of that 73-year-old woman. Lately I find our forest to be a very spooky place at night.

And since this is a Ranger Randy article, here are some interesting facts about mountain lions:

Statistically, it is about a thousand times less likely that you will be attacked by a mountain lion than that you will be struck by lightning. (That’s a national statistic. I figure my numbers are a bit higher at the moment.)
They are hugely successful, with a range that extends from the Yukon in Alaska to the southern end of the Andes, and from coast to coast in both Americas, but with this caveat: we exterminated them everywhere east of the Mississippi, and they haven’t recovered yet.
Probably because of their huge range, they have over 40 names in English alone: Cougar, mountain lion, panther, puma, catamount—it goes on and on.
They have the largest hind quarters of any cat, even proportionally (and they’re big cats) and it makes them capable of spectacular vertical leaps of up to 18 feet. (That’s from the ground to the roof of a two-story house.) Horizontally they can do 35 or 40.
They are what’s called a hypercarnivore, meaning that they are purists about eating only meat. Yet they are generalists in their hunting practices, and the meat can take the form of anything from insects up to a moose. In the US, deer are their main prey.
As with most animals including us, you don’t want to mess with the mothers: they’ve been known to fight off grizzly bears in defense of their young.
They hiss, growl and purr just like a domestic cat. They also chirp, and whistle.

Now you know.

Episode Two

Chapter two of the mountain lion saga is also a pretty good yarn, but with a sad ending.

Another of our neighbors in Big Sur, California has—or rather had—16 hens and a rooster in a chicken coop. Several days after the above events, when they walked some guests over there to show them the chickens, they looked through the wire into the face of a mountain lion.

From what they could reconstruct later in a calmer state, the mountain lion probably jumped onto the roof of the chicken coop, fell through the wire into it, massacred every chicken there, and then couldn’t get out. However, they didn’t know about this “couldn’t get out” part at that particular moment, and assumed themselves to be seconds away from dismemberment. They retreated quickly into the nearest structure, which was a greenhouse, where, I assume, they looked apprehensively out at the lion and mulled over their situation with suddenly-focussed minds. Finally, one brave soul made a run for an automobile and swung by to pick the others up, and got everyone to the safety to the house. (Safety is a relative term here—this was, after all, almost certainly the same mountain lion that crashed through a glass door into a house in episode one.)

Fish and Game came out, and our neighbors agonized with the officer about what to do. The officer was willing to consider releasing her, but argued that this cougar had picked up some habits that made her dangerous. Relocating the lion was not an option. The California Department of Fish and Game doesn’t do that, and I can think of several good reasons for the policy, the best one being that it seldom results in anything but the death by starvation of the relocated animal. No, they were told, it was release her back into the neighborhood, or shoot her.

There was a two-month-old baby on the property, along with four adults and many more animals. It was not an easy decision, but they decided to put the lion down. The deed was done quickly, with a single shot through the heart.

It was necessary, but Susan and I went home that night feeling saddened, and I was lamenting that we could no longer live in harmony with the creatures around us. Then the ghost of Ed Abbey that lives inside me piped up and said, “What harmony?” Ed Abbey, in case you don’t know him, is a wonderful writer and uncompromising defender of the wild who hated the sentimentalizing of nature, and I had to admit, he spoke the truth. The unsentimental fact is, nobody “lives in harmony” with a mountain lion, including other wild creatures. Even our pre-historic hunter-gatherer ancestors did not, I’m sure, “live in harmony” with them. They were probably killing and being killed, stealing one anothers’ prey and generally getting on each others’ nerves. You can find harmony in those long-ago times, but you have to look a level higher, at the numbers: Our ancestors were few enough that neither species threatened the other in a permanent way. In that sense, there was, if not harmony, at least balance.

So Susan and I decided not to get weepy about a harmony that never existed. We sat down on the deck and recited William Blake’s “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright” into the woods, and raised a glass to the creature. Adieu, magnificent one!

Ladybugs and Other Nasty-Tasting Things

Susan and I live in California in a redwood forest, in a land called Big Sur (some of the time–we’re kind of disorganized and move around a lot). One of several magical things about our property there is that it is a congregation site for ladybugs. Some times of the year, things look like the snapshots here, which were taken in summer of 2008. They mass on railing posts and tree trunks, they lie in blankets under the forest duff, and sometimes you can’t walk across the deck without making a disturbing crunch-crunch sound. On warm days they take wing in clouds, and end up inside the house, crawling all over you. Susan once muttered, “You know, it’s actually kind of refreshing when you feel something crawling on you, and you look down and it’s a spider.”

: Convergent Ladybird Beetles (Hippodamia convergens) in our forest duff in Big Sur

And not many people know this: Those little suckers bite! Okay, it’s not a bad bite, but when they’re boiling up your pant legs from the leaf litter it can get annoying.

But of course, I’ve never been able to stay annoyed at one of nature’s miracles for very long, so I did what I usually do and looked up some stuff on ladybugs. Here you go:

They’re actually called the convergent ladybird beetle (they’re actually called Hippodamia convergens, but let’s not go to the Latin place), and almost everything we know about them, we know because of the agriculture industry, so I’m awash in information about the movements of the California Central Valley ladybugs, but no wiser about the ones on our Big Sur property. Oh, well. Still, the Central Valley story is a pretty good yarn, so listen up:

In the farm fields of the Central Valley, the ladybugs gorge on aphids in the spring, mate, lay eggs and die. The larvae hatch and gorge on more aphids (this is why farmers know a lot about ladybugs and consider them to be extremely cool). When they turn into adults in June, they fly east to the Sierra Nevada mountains to over-winter, and that’s pretty interesting because beetles, as a group, are pretty crummy flyers, and ladybugs are no exception. So how do you migrate hundreds of miles by air when you have no compass, no brain to speak of, and you’re a bad flyer? Well, here’s what they do: they simply fly upward. Period. That’s all they do. Ask a ladybug how she does it and that’s all you’ll get back. But here’s what happens:

At altitude a favorable wind takes them and carries them east toward the mountains while they just continue flying up because that’s all they do, and an interesting thing keeps them from ending up in outer space: Like most cold-blooded animals, they go into a stupor in the cold, and it gets cold with altitude (4.5 degrees farenhiet colder per thousand feet). This is fun because it proves that evolution is nothing if not innovative. The evolutionary process invented the concept of turning a problem into an opportunity, and they have actually made that stupor thing work for them. They wouldn’t be good enough flyers to maintain a consistent altitude on their own, but what happens is that at several thousand feet, when it gets so cold that they can’t function, they fold their wings and drop like little pebbles for a thousand or more feet until they warm up, then they come to and start climbing again because that’s all they do. The result is an eastward path that occilates up and down by about a thousand feet, staying in the general vicinity of 6,000 feet, give or take a thousand. Eventually, they simply run into a mountainside, and consider themselves to have arrived.

All summer they move down the mountains in the canyons, then they hibernate under the duff or the snowpack at about 2,000 feet of elevation, and when they wake up in the spring they fly back west to the farm fields to do it all again. This time, though, there’s no Sierra Nevada mountain range to stop them, so they just fly until it turns dark and cold, and then they fold their wings and drop all the way to the ground. The result is that the ones who leave early in the morning make it the farthest and populate the western Central Valley, while the ones who leave later don’t get as far and end up more in the east.

They’re pretty interesting creatures. If you disturb a plant that they’re on, they will drop off, and it will look to you like they just had a poor grip on things, but actually it’s done on purpose. It’s a defensive move, and if you look at where they fell, you’ll find that they’re lying there playing dead.

But actually, they have almost no predators, because they taste nasty. They excrete blood from their leg joints when they’re disturbed, in a process called reflex bleeding, and the blood has an alkaloid in it that tastes like hell, and is toxic. Their bold orange and black markings are considered warning coloration. A bird will try one once, and will not soon forget that look. It’s thought that they acquired the coloration in the Cretacious period. They’re a much older animal than that, but the Cretacious period was when birds began to become important predators.

And a friend of mine pointed out something else that’s fascinating about the ladybug: we all love them. The most squeamish person in the world will love ladybugs. Everybody thinks they’re cute, and no one minds when they crawl on them. And I’m as irrational about it as anyone else. If that were any other insect massing on our property in those numbers, I would be absolutely horrified. And that one, Ranger Randy cannot explain for you. I love all things natural, but I politely avoid the subject of how my mind works.

Folks collect them in the Sierras, literally by the gallon, and sell them to nurseries, who sell them to gardeners. The collectors get twenty bucks per gallon (a gallon is about 70,000 ladybugs), and they can make up to $1,000 per day. We have never collected or sold ours, and would not dream of doing that to the creatures. (We’re unkind enough to them every time we have to walk across the deck.) And anyway, there’s a fallacy to releasing ladybugs in your garden. Remember where they were in their life cycle when they were collected: The next thing they do will not be eat—it will be fly.

Now you know.

Mountain Lions, Forest Fires and 73-Year-Old Women

Mountain Lions, Forest Fires and 73-Year-Old Women

Episode Two

Ladybugs and Other Nasty-Tasting Things

Ladybugs and Other Nasty-Tasting Things

Convergent Ladybird Beetles (Hippodamia convergens) in our forest duff in Big Sur