MountainLion_Counting_Elbroch_Mark_SequimWA_25February2023_Reel4144.mp3

Mark Elbroch [00:00:01] This is a species who makes its living from remaining invisible.

Mark Elbroch [00:00:07] And so they can slip in between us, around us, you know, through the forest without being seen.

Mark Elbroch [00:00:15] I mean, that's the goal, right, for a mountain lion, is to be able to place itself in the right place to either take down a deer, or elk, or other type of prey before it's seen, or to be able to move so quietly they can see it from afar and then sneak to within a close striking distance, so that they can leap forth and take their prey down.

Mark Elbroch [00:00:39] So everything about it is about stealth and invisibility. So they're hard to find, just in general.

Mark Elbroch [00:00:47] And then, you take the fact that they wander huge distances, some of them, hundreds of miles.

Mark Elbroch [00:00:53] And, you know, you put that on a landscape with topography, where there's canyons and mountains and, you know, thick forests and dense bush, brush in south Texas.

Mark Elbroch [00:01:04] And, you know, the chance of encountering one, you know, just get lower and lower.

Mark Elbroch [00:01:09] First, they're really good at hiding. And second, you know, they only pass through a particular spot of land once every so often, because they're wandering big areas, and females much smaller than males, but still big areas, considering what we do on a typical day.

Mark Elbroch [00:01:27] And then the third factor's that they aren't as abundant as some other animals. So there's, there's not as many of them out there as, say, coyotes or bobcats or foxes and things, other carnivores.

Mark Elbroch [00:01:43] And so, again, you add that in and so you've got an animal that's really good at hiding, one that wanders super far, and so the chances of encountering it in a particular place at any given moment is small. And then there's just not that many of them.

Mark Elbroch [00:01:59] It just makes them really tough to study, and even tougher to count.

Mark Elbroch [00:02:05] And much of traditional wildlife management in the United States is about counting animals. You know, there's been an evolution of management practices in the United States. But, one of the sort of pivoting points was this obsession with maximum sustainable yield, which is this idea that, you know, wildlife are, number one, resources for us to utilize. And, number two, that there's some sort of ideal number that could exist out there and that beyond that are sort of extras, and that we can harvest that extra without impacting the number on the landscape.

Mark Elbroch [00:02:45] And so to get to understand that pivoting point of what is maximum sustainable yield for deer, elk, salmon, whatever you want, you kind of have to know how many are out there. And so counting animals becomes sort of a fundamental component of any management plan implemented by any agency, whether it's state, federal, and their plans for wildlife.

Mark Elbroch [00:03:10] And so, yeah, mountain lions are tough to find, tough to encounter, tough to count.

Mark Elbroch [00:03:17] And in Texas, in particular, there's been very few efforts to try to do any of those things, certainly not to count them at scale.