From the issue dated March 20, 1991
'PRINCE OF PREDATORS'
Idaho Professor Becomes the Authority on Pumas After 28 Years of Tracking Them
By Peter Monaghan
Hailey, Idaho -- For 28 years Maurice Hornocker has been tracking mountain lions wherever they are found -- in the West and Southwest, in the back country, on canyon walls, up trees. In that time, Mr. Hornocker, a professor in the department of fisheries and wildlife resources at the University of Idaho, has built a reputation as the premier authority on the animal.
That is a remarkable achievement, given that knowledgeable people told him when he began studying the mountain lion in 1963 not to bother: The animal simply was too elusive, they said.
"That was the advice I got from most of my graduate committee," he says. "But it just didn't seem logical."
Yet quickly, he remembers, he got their point: "After the first week or 10 days, I thought, `What have I done? The task is too great; the mountains are too high; the canyons are too steep.' That was just devastating -- to realize the return of information would be so slow."
Radio tracking had not yet been perfected. So, for five straight winters, he trekked through snow across 200 square miles of rugged Idaho back country with Wilbur Wiles, a veteran outdoorsman, capturing lions to study them.
The mountain lion's agility and awesome predatory efficiency have made it the stuff of legend. Since the period of European settlement of the West, it has been reviled as a maverick killer of livestock, elk, and deer, and targeted for extermination. That, to Mr. Hornocker, was an appalling way to treat the largest and most enigmatic of the cats found in North America. He has devoted his career to revising its image.
Mountain lions are found from British Columbia to Patagonia, and sit at the top of the food chain in many habitats -- from forests to deserts, swamps, and coastal dunes. In the United States, however, they are confined to the western states and Texas. A few remain in Florida, where they are known as panthers. (The mountain lion has gone by many names, including cougar and puma. Those are not, as is often believed, separate animals. Rarer names include catamount or painter. The scientific term, Felis concolor, means "cat of one color.")
In the early 1960's, as a doctoral student and outdoors enthusiast at the University of British Columbia, Mr. Hornocker discovered that the mountain lion was the least-studied of the large American carnivores. When he set about documenting its predation, habitats, and life cycles, he soon realized how ill-informed public opinion really was.
His first research project, since regarded as the seminal study in the field, was in Idaho, in what is now called the River of No Return Wilderness. Over 10 years, Mr. Hornocker developed techniques still used today -- tracking and treeing lions with dogs, drugging them with firing syringes, and collaring them with radio transmitters.
His work produced an image of the puma that, he recalls, displeased hunters, farmers, and ranchers, who considered the puma a varmint and a wanton killer.
Certainly Mr. Hornocker's research showed that the animal is an awesome hunter -- "the prince of predators," as he puts it. A puma, which can weigh from 75 to 220 pounds and measure up to six feet plus a tail half as long, is capable of dispatching animals much larger than itself. He demonstrated that pumas select prey from their home range, and strengthen wildlife populations by culling sick or injured animals. Depending on its habitat, a puma will feed on anything from deer to bighorn sheep to skunks and other small mammals. If farms and ranches are within its range, it may hunt on them, too.
But Mr. Hornocker also showed that pumas attack livestock far less often than is commonly thought. And they are relatively harmless, he showed, because they are shy animals that avoid humans if they can -- and even avoid each other by maintaining strict territories.
A mark of his success, and that of other advocates of the lions, is that regulation of lion hunting spread after the 1960's. The mountain lion now is endangered only in Florida. Researchers say its numbers clearly jumped in the West in the 1970's, but that tallying the populations is a tall order. Some put the U.S. total at 16,000.
Since his first project, Mr. Hornocker has continued to capture, tag, and study mountain lions -- so many, for so long, that he can tell an observer of particular wilderness areas which individual lion lives there. In addition, he has pioneered the use of modern techniques in studies of such elusive animals as the wolverine and the marten in Montana and the river otter in Idaho. He and colleagues also have completed a ground-breaking study of leopards in South Africa's Kruger National Park.
He has been at the University of Idaho since 1968, when he began directing the Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit there. He and a former student, Howard B. Quigley, assistant professor of wildlife biology at Frostburg State University, recently signed an agreement with the Soviet Academy of Sciences to study the Siberian tiger, the world's most endangered large cat.
Mr. Hornocker has enjoyed an enviable arrangement with the university since 1985, when he semi-retired to make more time for research, generally working from his home here. He still supervises graduate students but does not teach. And he has set up the university-affiliated Hornocker Wildlife Research Institute. Housed on the Moscow campus, the institute's several researchers and hand-picked graduate assistants pursue projects on wilderness mammals. Many involve mountain lions. One project is demonstrating that mountain lions and deer and elk can thrive together. "The facts are in," Mr. Hornocker says. "We can have a flourishing of prey species and of other wildlife."
Mr. Hornocker and his colleagues are also documenting the lion's return to Yellowstone National Park, from which it was eradicated by 1930. In New Mexico, they are studying lions on the White Sands Missile Range, which Mr. Hornocker calls an "outdoor laboratory," long preserved from human intervention and ideal for mounting the most intensive lion study yet. He and colleagues are simulating the over-hunting of a population of lions by moving half of them. "Most work in biology is descriptive," he says, "and we're criticized for that. This is an attempt to measure cause and effect."
The institute is also monitoring jaguars in Brazil and lynxes in north-central Washington State. In addition, its researchers are breeding whooping cranes, a highly endangered species, to re-introduce them to Idaho and New Mexico.
To develop his cougar-research techniques, Mr. Hornocker has had to scale many a tree and take some risks. On occasion he found himself face to face with startled or inadequately tranquilized lions. "Some of those situations are quite dangerous," he notes.
But in his line of work, says Mr. Hornocker, "the real danger is the country" -- flying small planes in the back country, often in bad weather; living in tents all winter; and traveling on foot over icy slopes while dodging avalanches. "Just living under these conditions is spartan to say the least," he says. "Then there's the threat of an accident that could leave you in tough shape. There isn't any help."
He still spends as much time as he can in the field, away from administrative duties, but electronic and satellite technologies, he says, have changed things: "The days of the old, lone naturalist-biologist with his binoculars and notebook are pretty well past."
Whenever he can, he argues that the mountain lion should be re-introduced wherever its former habitats permit. To sway public opinion on the matter, he has made his research accessible through articles in such magazines as National Wildlife and Natural History. In 1974, his first lion study was the subject of a National Geographic television documentary.
Late last year, ABC aired a documentary featuring Mr. Hornocker's work, "Cougar: Ghost of the Rockies." It depicted two years in the life of a captive mountain lion, placed in a large wilderness enclosure while raising three cubs.
The film also showed a cougar hunt where high-technology equipment put the prey at a gross disadvantage. That is hardly the kind of treatment of lions that Mr. Hornocker advocates. Yet he says: "I don't oppose hunting -- I'm a hunter myself -- as long as it's legal, and there is reverence for the animal you're killing. And, most importantly, as long as there is a sound biological reason for the hunting."
Fortunately, he says, protection of animals and habitats is increasing as public attitudes change. Pointing to New York State's efforts to increase its lynx population, he predicts: "It's just a matter of time until people say it'd be nice to have the eastern panther back."
In fact, he foresees a time, perhaps soon, when the mountain lion will enjoy the kind of "complete cultural turnaround" that has secured the future of the golden eagle. Only 20 years ago, he points out, the eagle was reviled by ranchers; now it is championed along with other birds of prey.
Mountain lions, he says, will avoid direct contact with humans, though they often watch them closely, undetected. In his life of stalking them, Mr. Hornocker says, he has seen free-roving lions infrequently, since he usually doesn't spot them until his tracking dogs have treed them.
Of course, he allows, each mauling or stalking of a child, or each close encounter with hikers, rightly fuels fear of mountain lions. Respect for the wilderness, he says, includes keeping out of wild animals' way.
Yet in all of U.S. history, Mr. Hornocker points out, mountain lions have been known to kill only 11 humans. Ever a defender of "the prince of predators," he says: "It does little good to point out that pit-bull terriers are far more dangerous to kids in the U.S."
Copyright © 1991 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
