Mountain lions starved to death after they were relocated to desert, CA officials say
Wildlife officials in California are revising policies that they say caused two mountain lions to starve to death in the Mojave Desert in 2021.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife tried rehoming two adult male mountain lions that were preying on bighorn sheep in the Sierra Nevada. Officials trucked the cats — known as L147 and L176 — out to an area east of the Mojave Desert in the Mescal Range where officials believed they would have enough mule deer to eat, according to the department’s 2021 report on bighorn sheep recovery efforts.
Officials knew mountain lions — especially males — have strong homing instincts that would drive them back toward their territory, according to the report. They hoped the Mojave Desert would block the cats from heading back west, forcing them to establish new territories to the southeast where prey is abundant.
But the cats had no interest in that. They starved to death trying to cross the 210 miles of barren desert landscape “in a straight line northwest towards” their home range, the report said.
“Homing behavior of adult males is likely to be a challenge to successful translocation of adult males,” officials said in the report.
L147 was found dead March 29, 2021, “in an emaciated condition, suggesting starvation as a cause of mortality,” officials said in the report.
L176 was alive when officials found him May 5, 2021 — but just barely. He was so emaciated, officials “had to” euthanize him, the report said.
“In hindsight, it wasn’t a good place to release those lions,” Tom Stephenson told the Los Angeles Times. He is a senior environmental scientist at the agency and one of the authors on the report. “We’re not moving them to that environment anymore.”
In a statement emailed to McClatchy News, spokesperson Jordan Traverso described how “challenging” it is for the department to manage “so many cherished species” and said the department would learn from the mistake.
Up until 2017, the department killed mountain lions on site in order to protect dwindling populations of bighorn sheep, Traverso said. The department decided to try relocating the two lions as an alternative to that previous method, she said.
“It is never easy and it is certainly not perfect,” she said in the email. “We regret that these lions died in this manner, and we will learn from it…. Future translocations will benefit from many lessons learned in these cases.”
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