Contact: Cherie Winner, Washington State Magazine,cwinner@wsu.edu 509/335-4486
Counting Cougs
Wildlife technician Gabe Wilson ’04 and graduate student Hilary Cooley try to pinpoint the location of a cougar based on the VHF radio signal from its collar.
Rob Wielgus, director of the Large Carnivore Conservation Lab at Washington State University, says one clear finding from his research and that of his graduate students is that wildlife managers should not assume that an increase in complaints about cougars means there are more cougars around. In many cases, just the opposite is true: even a declining population can lead to more sightings and more complaints, if the remaining cougars are adolescents who don't know any better than to stay away from humans.
Based on his work over the last decade, Wielgus says that with solitary predators such as cougars, age matters. One of the biggest influences on how the animals behave around humans is the age structure of their population, especially how many young males there are. And that, in turn, depends largely on how heavily they are hunted and how many big males are taken out of the population.
He explains that although cougars don't live in packs, they do have contact with others of their kind. The interactions between adolescents and adult males help teach the youngsters what is and isn't appropriate prey, and what is and isn't acceptable behavior.
Young male cougars make trouble, he says, "because they don't
know what they're doing. When you have no old guys left, then no
one controls the troublemakers." He says a juvenile cougar is like
an 18-year-old human. Take out the dominant males who keep them in
line, and "that's all you've got, is 18-year-old males running the
show. Just try to imagine what the world would be like."
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