Email
PrintA Lion's Tale
Cougar research opens doors of discovery on our local predator population.
After being treed by hounds, the female cougar researchers know as F13 eyes her pursuers from a lofty perch. The team would soon tranquilize the cat with a dart gun in order to replace her failing radio collar.
(page 1 of 5)
Lefty has cut his paw. The eight-year-old bloodhound leaves a bloody smudge in the snow every fourth step, but he’s a professional and he doesn’t let it deter him. He sounds like an old man with smoker’s cough as he barks frantically up at the tree canopy. The bloody foot and vocal chord damage come with the job. Lefty is a veteran treer of big cats; he’s hunted down more than 350 cougars and bobcats during his career.
The object of Lefty’s current consternation is F13, a six-year-old female cougar sitting on a tree branch about twenty feet up. Despite the racket and activity, she looks almost serene, like a tabby on a windowsill. Maybe she’s used to it. Over F13’s lifetime, dog handler Boone Smith and the biologists from Craighead Beringia South’s Teton Cougar Project have captured her five or six times for various radio collar replacements or to gather scientific data. Today, she’ll get fitted with a new collar that combines both a radio transceiver and a global positioning system (GPS) device. The GPS will give researchers more detailed knowledge about her movements, including where she eats and, if she mates, the location of the den where she raises her kittens.
Or, maybe she’s pleased that—despite the ruckus below from Lefty and his three-year-old partner, Poncho—it was more dumb luck than smart dogs that caught her this time. Even with hounds and a radio collar, the hunt for F13 took several hours of strenuous hiking, postholing, and, finally, snowshoeing through the woods above the Moran Post Office. When Poncho and Lefty finally scented the trail on a steep northwest slope with heavy dead and down timber, Smith set them free of their leashes and led us on an awkward chase over crusty April snow. Down a drainage and up a steep hillside, we’d almost returned to the half-mud, half-snow trail where we started, when the dogs came back, looking defeated through their canine grins and wagging tails. Once, Smith pointed out a perfect cougar track: four toe pads without claw marks; try to draw an X through the toes and you’ll run into the heel pad. But, he said, the tracks were old and frozen over; probably from this morning.
Just as group morale begins to wane, Craighead biologist Jesse Newby casually points to the branches of a large conifer. “There she is,” he says.
Now, with F13 perched above us, Smith ties Poncho and Lefty to a nearby tree and changes into dry socks. “I can see Poncho [losing the trail], ’cause he’s young,” he says. “But I thought Lefty would nail it.”
Despite F13’s seemingly pounce-ready position, none of us is carrying a cougar stick—four-foot-long shovel handles and assorted other whacking devices Smith distributed earlier in case of an emergency.
Directly beneath F13’s branch, Newby and biologist Marjie MacGregor record various data and prepare a tranquilizer dart full of Ketamine, a common anesthetic with hallucinogenic properties. “We need them alert enough so that they can hang on to the tree, but dopey enough so we can climb up there [safely],” Newby says.
MacGregor explains that F13 likes to roam. Biologists have tracked her zigzag path through Jackson Hole to such far-flung places as Miller Butte, East Gros Ventre Butte, Flagg Ranch, and Death Canyon. “This is my favorite cat,” MacGregor says. “She’s tricky. I feel like she’s a Jackson cat.”
